#Oddepia
Mushrooms spreading their spores in the wind looks like magic that is invisible to the eye Sparkles, Within biology, mushrooms have sometimes been written off as uncomplicated organs that simply produce as many spores as possible. How far those spores traveled across a landscape, researchers assumed, depended on the whims of the wind. As scientists look closer, however, a more complex picture is emerging.
“Mushrooms are really the dark matter of biology,” says Marcus Roper, a mathematician at the University of California, Los Angeles. “They're everywhere, but they're horribly understudied.”
Roper and his colleagues used high-speed videography and mathematical analysis to investigate how spores dispersed, even in the absence of wind. In fact, as the researchers announced at a recent meeting of the American Physical Society's Division of Fluid Dynamics, the mushrooms themselves manufacture air currents.
