Have you ever seen a fungus firing its spores to the tune of the Anvil Chorus from Il Travatore?
I’ll take that as a no.
Nicholas Money, an expert on fungi at Miami University, has been playing around with very fast video. Ultra fast. As in 250,000 frames-a-second fast. He knew exactly what this kind of video was made for. To film fungi that live on dung as they discharge their spores. These tiny fungi can blast spores as far as six feet away, boosting the odds that they’ll land on a clean plant that a cow or other grazing animal may eat. The fungi develop inside the animal, get pooped out with its dung, and fire their spores once more.
Money’s results were not just significant, but beautiful. The fungi fire their spores up to 55 miles an hour–which translates to an acceleration of 180,000 g. Money calls it “the fastest flight in nature.”
Money has just published his results in the journal PLOS One, and his students, in a justified fit of ecstasy, have created the first fungus opera. Behold:
September 16th, 2008 at 10:02 pm
Absolutely brilliant.
September 17th, 2008 at 12:52 am
Wait … you mean that’s dung on the left of the frame!?
September 17th, 2008 at 11:05 am
Amazing. Someone buy that man a beverage of his choice. He deserves it.
September 17th, 2008 at 11:34 am
Buller wrote a few hundred pages about the fungus, the anamorph of a Zygomycete, Pilobolus. I believe he described it going about 12 feet (possibly more) and I have seen it go this far myself germinating from some horse dung in a demonstration put on by Prof Don Pfister at the Humboldt Research Station, Eagle Hill, Maine.
It is an easy fungus to grow from horse dung and great to show phototropism.
It will appear in a few days. generally.
Laurie Leonard
September 17th, 2008 at 11:48 am
I love to see work from scientists with a bit of whimsy; good science requires both a sense of wonder and a sense of humor.
September 17th, 2008 at 12:56 pm
[...] Zimmer has a new post up at the Loom that directs folks to a new video of pilobus fungi “shooting” their [...]
September 17th, 2008 at 4:18 pm
How is that ejection speed even possible? Man, now I gotta spend my day *learning*, my curiosity is far too piqued.
September 18th, 2008 at 12:23 pm
Filmed by Nicholas Money … these fungal blasts would be Money shots??
September 20th, 2008 at 9:37 pm
isn’t all opera fungal…
September 21st, 2008 at 4:33 pm
[...] Fungus Opera. Fungus spores fly 55 miles per hour to the sweet tunes of Il Travatore. [...]
September 21st, 2008 at 11:46 pm
Tucker has the big question: how do they do it? The mechanism would obviously have incredible applications on a larger scale.
September 26th, 2008 at 6:57 am
[...] to see fungi firing their spores to the tune of the “Anvil Chorus” from Il Trovatore. Click here and let Carl Zimmer show you how to make that dream come [...]
September 27th, 2008 at 2:36 pm
I will never look at a slice of camembert the same….
October 6th, 2008 at 12:13 am
[...] of 180,000 g. Research from the lab of Nicholas Money. Music video by Dr. Money’s students. (SLYT) via posted by Slithy_Tove (17 comments total) 3 users marked this as a favorite wow! that [...]
October 6th, 2008 at 4:21 pm
[...] Fungus Opera An acceleration force of 180,000 g makes for some pretty speedy spores in this video set to crescendoing classical music. (via 3qd) [...]
October 7th, 2008 at 10:40 am
Stacey, that’s not a man. It’s a fungi.
October 7th, 2008 at 10:55 am
frelkins: Years ago, there were “rocket” toys that you filled with water, pumped full of air, and then released the clip on the pump, letting the rocket shoot several feet into the air. Not 180kG, granted, but that is what this would be scaled up. Darned square-cube rule.
kuhnigget: Cheese is from bacteria, not mold, and I doubt mushrooms work this way. It’s cow patties you need to never look at the same way again… they have a 6-foot ranged attack you never knew about.
Dr. Money: Awesome. ‘Nuff said.
October 7th, 2008 at 11:35 am
Mike D.: Are you arguing that Camembert doesn’t have an outer layer of white mold or that Camembert isn’t a cheese?
October 7th, 2008 at 12:22 pm
Camembert, Blue Cheese, and many other cheeses are ripened via mold (penicillium in many cases). But I think they are first processed by bacteria, then mold.
October 7th, 2008 at 12:34 pm
“Nicholas Money, an expert on fungi at Miami University, has been playing around with very fast video”
I guess you could call this the “Money shot”?
October 7th, 2008 at 2:12 pm
I bet this dude is a fungi to hang around with, what with all the talk of a entering a shooting team into the next olympics.
Long live “spore”t!
October 7th, 2008 at 2:41 pm
Hey Mike D!
Don’t forget about Roquefort, Stilton and Gorgonzola! Just a few of the delectable varieties of cheese that contain mold…….
October 8th, 2008 at 1:08 am
[...] fungi I worte about in “Cow Crap Cannons” – are definitely going places. Check out this post in Zimmer’s “The Loom”, featuring the world’s first fungal [...]
October 8th, 2008 at 9:11 pm
Is that camera fast enough to catch those picture?
or this is just computer emulate it.
October 13th, 2008 at 10:34 am
Kinda weird yet interesting.
October 13th, 2008 at 1:09 pm
[...] of Theo Jansen – [cool art] Emails you get when your company about to go under – [not funny] The Fungus Opera: bizarre video – [nature] Light’s Most Exotic Trick: So Fast it Goes … Backwards? – [science] Google’s New [...]
October 16th, 2008 at 4:29 am
[...] Money has just published his results in the journal PLOS One, and his students, in a justified fit of ecstasy, have created the first fungus opera. [Via] [...]
October 17th, 2008 at 9:59 pm
That is wonderful! And that sense of whimsy and delight on the part of their professors is how two of my kids ended up as biology majors. Well done!
November 6th, 2008 at 9:20 am
[...] posted in YouTube by Carl Zimmer from whose blog post I read about this [...]
December 5th, 2008 at 6:18 pm
The biodynamics and physics of fungi are pretty amazing. I’m lucky to have Nik as a professor.
January 16th, 2009 at 1:34 am
[...] posted in YouTube by Carl Zimmer from whose blog post I read about this paper Share and [...]
October 17th, 2009 at 2:51 pm
[...] Fungus Opera | The Loom | Discover Magazine http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2008/09/16/fungus-opera/ [...]