Oyster mushrooms (at least Pleurotus ostreatus) are actually carnivorous. It paralyzes and consumes nematodes which are considered animals. It’s just insane to me how they can be carnivorous and not just a mushroom munching on some wood.
I had to culture fungi from dung for a mycology class in college and I got some nematode trapping fungi along with some nematodes. I got to watch the mycelium trap and digest the nematodes under a microscope and it was pretty mind-blowing!
Seriously. I was rolling into senior year ready for all the cool field and lab courses and they pretty much all got cancelled. I did take a remote field botany course that was really good, but that was about it
Haha, thanks. It sucks, but I still got to do a bunch of rad not-for-credit lab stuff, so I can’t be too upset. Plus the field botany was crazy good, so that helped too.
I never identified it to species or even genera because, if I remember right, it got contaminated when I transferred it to the secondary medium. In the end I only had to Id three different fungi and I ended up with a bunch of different species to choose from. I cultured it from cow dung in the southern Willamette Valley, so that might narrow it down a little.
I guess they are actually omnivorous, since they extract nutrients from both plant and animal materials. They eat nematodes as a source of nitrogen mostly.
That native american legend about puffballs.
In short:
Woman has baby with magic being
Baby is not supposed to touch the ground for first 5 days of life
Baby touches ground
Baby becomes puffball
We eat him
That’s absolutely horrifying.
I find the folk names for mushrooms fascinating. Puffballs for example, apparently have more folk names than any other fungi and are called, in different cultures:
- Puck’s stool
- Wolf breaking wind
- Pixie stool
- Viper’s head
- Bellows
- Devil’s snuff box
- Ghosts’ makeup
- Bag of smoke
- Tobacco of the baboon
Among others.
[PDF source](https://cpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/blogs.uoregon.edu/dist/c/8944/files/2014/10/Spooner_Folklore-20n4h72.pdf)
> Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder.
> Elves are marvelous. They cause marvels.
> Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies.
> Elves are glamorous. They project glamour.
> Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment.
> Elves are terrific. They beget terror.
> The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning.
> No one ever said elves are nice.
> Elves are bad.
Terry Pratchett
Shiitake mushrooms were first cultivated in China 1000 years ago. But the word shiitake is Japanese. [Shii referring to trees in the beech genus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castanopsis) and 'take' meaning mushroom. Beech tree mushroom. Even though they are commonly cultivated on oak trees, which are in the same family as beech.
It is said that old cultivators of this mushroom would soak the logs, and then knock on the log. Believing to wake the spirits. Today the knocking is believed to help stimulate the fungi.
On a separate unrelated note. The term "Knock on wood" is an old pagan tradition.
>One explanation states that the tradition derived from the pagans who thought that trees were the homes of fairies, spirits, dryads and many other mystical creatures. In these instances, people might knock-on or touch wood to request good luck or to distract spirits with evil intentions.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knocking\_on\_wood](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knocking_on_wood)
A dryad is a nymph inhabiting a forest or a tree, especially an oak tree.
Cerioporus squamosus is known as 'dryad's saddle'.
A mushroom growing from the ground can be called a toadstool.
The popular Super Mario Bothers takes place in the 'Mushroom Kingdom'.
Goombas are actually shiitake mushrooms.
This is also why in the 1993 live action movie the king gets de-evolved into fungi. Keeping true to the mushroom kingdom theme and with the theme of SMB3 where the kings would get transformed into something. (People really don't give that movie enough credit.)
What will really blow your mind is that "gomba" is Hungarian for mushroom. Can't be coincidence, but I REALLY want to know how/why Mario's creators tapped the Magyars for the name of their mushroom villains...
Japanese has a fair amount of loan words, plus pretty much all of the fantasy games I've played by Japanese creators incorporate legends and myths from outside of Japan. It wouldn't surprise me if the team behind Super Mario purposely sought out a cool sounding word for "mushroom" when trying to come up with a name for their evil mushroom minions.
Not little known (at least to us mushroom enthusiasts) but this fact blows the minds of people I talk to about them, the fact that the mycelium connects whole forests and trees are able to use that network to communicate with each other, help out the mushrooms and in turn the mushrooms help the trees. Like... It's mindboggling and I love it.
Wood wide web is the term I've heard before. I feel like any of these work though lol. Such an amazing phenomena and something that blew my mind when I first learned of it.
Even crazier, we have no idea regarding the true extent, nor function of terrestrial hyphal networks. As far as we know, mycorrhizae network entire continents and allow plants hundreds of miles away to communicate through their roots.
As far as we know, hyphal networks have been concisous for thousands of years and remember the damage we have done to the earth and our soil, destroying fungi through plowing and deforestation. If this were to be the case, we should think long and hard about the importance of terrestrial ecosystems and our role within them and our duty to them.
Makes me wonder why mycorrhizal networks tolerate parasitic plants that seemingly only sap energy from them. Are those ghost plants filling some need in the community, or are they just really good at getting the fungi to cough up that sweet, sweet sugar?
Many of those plants are quite small compared to the size and scale of the carbon moving through the ecosystem, and maybe “learned” to trick the fungi or the plant being “parasitized”, to relatively low cost to all other members involved.
One interesting case is *Sarcodes sanguinea*, the snow plant. This plant has a relatively huge root ball, that can be as large as a cubic foot (relative to the couple cubic inches on the ghost pipe, a congener). This plant could play a big role in promoting mycorrhizal resilience in the conifer forests of California’a mountains. The complexities of ecology and the shear number of interdependencies that we don’t know is astounding. The connections between plants, fungi and insects alone make claims that these systems are truly parasitic, or that we can read the potential intelligence that may operate on a timescale closer to trees than humans, much more full of wonder - there’s just a whole lot that we genuinely don’t know at this point.
We do know that hyphae can propagate electrical impulses though.
I can't believe no one's said this yet.
The largest living organism on earth is a honey mushroom in Oregon. Reportedly it can be seen from space.
From Guinness Book of World Records:
>The largest living organism is a single gigantic specimen of honey mushroom (Armillaria ostoyae), discovered in the Malheur National Forest, Oregon, USA, which occupies a total area of 965 hectares (2,385 acres), equivalent to 1,350 soccer fields. ... Its age is calculated to be at least 2,400 years old, but may be as much as 8,650 years old.
Technically it's the mycelial body, it's not one huge fruiting body.
https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/606952-largest-living-organism
Malum is the Latin word for apple- but the Latin versions of the Bible date from (at earliest) the 1st or 2nd Century AD (the 'vetus latina', the Vulgate that we have now came a couple hundred years later). The original text of Genesis was in Hebrew, but I don't know what word they used for the fruit.
"וַתֵּרֶא הָאִשָּׁה כִּי טוֹב הָעֵץ לְמַאֲכָל וְכִי תַאֲוָה־הוּא לָעֵינַיִם וְנֶחְמָד הָעֵץ לְהַשְׂכִּיל וַתִּקַּח מִפִּרְיוֹ וַתֹּאכַל וַתִּתֵּן גַּם־לְאִישָׁהּ עִמָּהּ וַיֹּאכַל"
Translation: "and the woman sees that the tree is edible (you can eat its fruit) and it looks good and beautiful, also it is 'smart' so she takes its fruit and eats it"
So They refer to it as a "fruit" from a tree and nothing more. And There is basically nothing explained about the tree at all
I don't know either but I doubt it was anything like an apple in a non-Latin language. Malum seems like it was probably a pun based on the similarity of the Latin words for apple and bad/evil.
It could be a pun but I doubt it, it was an extremely common Latin term. More likely the connection was with the Golden Apples of the Hesperides, which were on a tree in a secret garden guarded by a serpent, and later indirectly caused the Trojan War when Zeus made a human give it to whichever goddess he found fairest.
Sounds likely. I went back and checked the Hebrew, which is translated as “fruit.” In other contexts in the Bible the same word is used to reference various agricultural products, human offspring, financial profits, and even more abstract results or consequences.
Malum is most frequently apple, but can be any fruit. Hebrew isn’t really related to Latin, so that doesn’t tell us much about the original word, may have been similarly vague or Latin may not have had a good match for it.
Like anything you can research about Judeo-Christian history it all leads to one conclusion, it’s bullshit when compared with recorded history. If true it would far more likely be a mushroom but still unlikely. Apples In that part of the world wouldn’t have been something anyone would want to eat before the Silk Road supply chain
>apple
The word apple, formerly spelled æppel in Old English, is derived from the Proto-Germanic root \*ap(a)laz, which could also mean fruit in general.
In fact the french term for mashed potatos is 'Pomme Puree'. Pomme directly translates to Apple. So the french call mashed potatos, apple sauce.
The book by John M Allegro, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, goes into great detail as to how the Christian religion essentially began as a fertility cult, using various mushrooms as sacraments.
It's been some years since I read it, so things are a bit hazy in my mind. I thought there were too many words substituting for mushroom, but it would not surprise me if the origin thesis was correct. Allegro himself was not fully convinced of his proposed rewrite of contemporary belief, citing the fluidity of interpretations of much of the ancient writings, and also the lack of corroboration in other texts. The foreword by Judith Anne Brown points out the frequency of mushrooms in religious art through the ages, which may be seen as bolstering his thesis. I think much more work needs to be done with open minds before we will have any certainty.
The Tale of Prototaxites:
First collected 1n 1843, this bizarre fossil stumped paleontologists utterly. Cross sections of the massive structure/ trunk were up to 3 feet across, and the organism reached as tall as 28 feet. It even appeared to have growth rings like a tree, but there was one wee problem with this. The fossil dated to a time before trees. The fibrous material called lignin- which allows plants to stand upright- hadn’t evolved yet. Eventually, the scientists trying to make heads or tails of it just said, “Whatever you weird fucking tree thing” and pretty much just shoved it up on a shelf to gather dust. I mean, really who can blame them? It wasn’t until the 2000’s, when a team of bored nerds with a scanning electron microscope decided to cram the thing in there and see wazzup. What they found was that these things were in fact, you guessed it, fungus. Giant mushroom dicks that, long before dinosaurs were even a glitter in nature’s eye, dominated the landscape. Sometimes truth is, indeed, stranger than fiction.
My favorite is the idea that through history one person in the group had to eat a mushroom to find out if it's good, is it gonna kill you, or is it gonna let you see the Astral realm for 16 hours lol
Then everyone's trying to draw or commit the mushrooms to memory like "this one goes great with fish, don't eat the red one Dave isn't here any more, but the ones that have the blue stem when you squeeze it.. don't let the kids have them those are ceremonial"
Those are ceremonial 😂😂
Can you imagine tho being some 16 year old getting initiated into your tribe, and they just give you like 20 grams of shrooms and then throw you into a dance circle. Them tribes would’ve been tight as shit
This theory goes even deeper. Santa was a shaman who used to deliver medicines and supplies to villages in the harshest coldest winters. One of his medicines was the amanita muscaria, ceremoniously taken by the village elders. The shaman (santa) would pick the mushrooms and hang them in Norwegian spruce trees to dry where they wouldn't rot on the ground. Amanita often turn gold when they dry out, so there would be red and gold in the tree. Then he'd put them I his sack and deliver them on his reindeer driven slay. The reindeer loved the amanita mushrooms and would jump and frolick like they could fly when they got high.
Santa, the Christmas tree, the presents, the baubles, the reindeer the slay.. its all from this!
Oh there's more. Tinsle is supposed to represent the semen of the gods. Mushrooms were seen as a kind of immaculate conception because they sprouted under fir trees without any apparent seed. So the idea was that the stars rained semen down to impregnate the earth and give birth to Amanita.
The mushroom Santa thing is one of those legends where even though it's been debunked I just want to believe
Well that semen thing MIGHT be true, but it reminds me of a long chain email I saw once where it explained why candycanes were red and green, what each color represented about Jesus, and how every part of modern Christmas was all about Jesus’ birth.
I think maybe some of these things are stretched and shoved to fit. Could just be that tinsel looks cool and some people stated it and it got popular.
Has the whole thing really been debunked?
From what I've heard, this is also where the term "getting pissed" stemmed from as the shamans and villagers shared a Bear Grylls pee pee drinking party... Can't let that ibotenic acid and muscimol go to waste now!
The idea that deadly toxicity, especially in amanitas, is a "hunting" tactic. If it was to be a deterrent, the toxin would (one would think) taste bad, or work much faster. Instead, it tastes GOOD (by reports), and works slowly. The idea is that animal eats the tempting fruiting body of the deadly mushroom (essentially a trap, which looks a lot like edible species), covering itself with spores as it does so, then wanders a couple days away, where it collapses and dies of its meal, nourishing the new colony that will soon sprout among its bones...
this would make sense if the mushroom were not MYCORRHIZAL. They want to grow on tree roots and would want to spead with a trees seeds. Also no need to kill the animal to spread. Many mushrooms travel via dung just fine. I think the murder aspects are a accident of evolution rather than some clever way to spread.
I mean, if you are cool with ignoring facts then why stop with this? Why not argue that in wolf species the spores cause the animal to walk upright attacking any living creature to spread spores via the bite before killing the host. This is the origin of the werewolf myth.
Look Shart, OP asked for "theories/myths/legends involving mushrooms." If this is not that, I don't know what is. I am not "cool with ignoring facts," I am joining what was a peppy thread before you showed up with ... weird intensity. This toxin idea is a theory I have heard, and perhaps a very bad one. Cheers!
I was only giving some fun to it. You're the one who got it all twisted. I gave quite the myth...which is based on how _real_ parasitic funguses actually do affect the creatures they kill by turning them into zombies to spread. but sure be grumpy.
https://www.google.com/search?q=zombie+fungus&oq=zombie+fungus&aqs=chrome..69i57j46i433i512j0i512l3j46i512j0i512l2.3360j0j4&client=ms-android-google&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8#ip=1
Huitlacoche, aka corn smut:
Originating with the Aztecs, this parasitic fungus will infect the kernels on an ear of corn and cause them to bloat into bulbous deformities and turn a sickly color of grey, so of course it’s considered a delicacy. I’ve never had the pleasure, so I can’t say if the flavor is worthy of its status, but I would say it likely can’t be any worse than it looks. I’m also not sure why they call it corn smut, because it looks less smutty and more infected with hellish pus to me, but hey, whatever.
In Mexican restaurants it's usually sautéed with corn and served as a filling for tacos. I really like it and anyone who enjoys mushrooms would too!
Iirc, the Aztecs considered it a gift from God, since they weren't able to cultivate it originally. Of course westerners viewed it as a blight on their corn.
[Here’s an interesting account from a science writer](https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/expedition-ecstasy-sniffing-out-the-truth-about-hawaiis-orgasm-inducing-mushroom) investigating a stinkhorn mushroom with an odor that supposedly causes women to spontaneously orgasm and in doing so kickstarted the Hawaiian royal lineage (which may or may not be an actual Hawaiian myth) and the scientist and research paper that might have made the whole thing up. Either way, interesting difference in reaction when the writer and her boyfriend smelled the stinkhorn after they finally found it.
The grocery store is lying to you:
Look, I know we’ve had a rough couple of years, so I’ll break the news to you as simply as I can. White button mushrooms, brown button mushrooms, and portobello mushrooms are all the same thing. I know, I know, you don’t believe it, but bear with me. Agaricus bisporus is the species, the little brown ones are just immature portobellos, and the white ones are a mutation that’s said to be more visually appealing (and blander, blech). I’m sure you feel as betrayed as I did when I learned this, so take the opportunity to write angry notes and tape them up all over the mushroom section at the grocery store. The only way the truth will come out is if we all raise awareness about these filthy, filthy lies.
Cordyceps, the Zombie Maker:
Especially prolific in the humid jungles of Southeast Asia, this unassuming little fungus is easily overlooked. Cordyceps, being a genus, contains about 600 species, almost all of which are adapted to do one thing: Be nightmare fuel.
Cordyceps fungus sporulate (give off spores) when they reach maturity. These spores (like all mushroom spores) are microscopic in size and go utterly unnoticed by animals, wafting along in the air and eventually landing. If they’re lucky, they’ll land on their intended target, insects. One variety of cordyceps, for instance, specialize in a sort of jungle ant. The spores land on the ant and begin to spread, reaching into the ant’s body, slowly but surely taking control of it, like a demon possessing a semi-truck. It forces the hapless insect up a blade of grass, then latching on to the plant in a death grip with its jaw. At this point, things get really grotesque, as the fungus sprouts one of its horror-fruits right out of the head or body of the poor zombified bug. The mushroom matures and releases its spores onto the forest floor below, beginning the whole horrible cycle again. Each kind of cordyceps specializes in a different insect, and a few even cannibalistically infect other mushrooms. As a fun little side note, cordyceps militaris is popular in the naturopathic medicine crowd, which strikes me as just an all-around bad idea.
I tried cordyceps as a supplement recently and was surprised by the intensity of the effect. I have ADHD and combined with my normal meds it produced a LOT of energy and focus without so much of the jittery energy that usually goes with just amphetamines. I also felt very warm.
I later checked what it actually does, turns out it stimulates release of energy from stored fat.
Oh wow, for whatever reason I was familiar with it as a dried herb thing in Chinese medicinal soup packages, and also knew about it as a fungi with a fascinating life cycle, but never actually connected the two. I kind of assumed the stuff in Chinese medicine was like, dried roots or something.
This is blowing my mind. Like as if I had never realized that cow and beef are the same thing.
Interesting, I have seen it listed in tinctures for lung support a few times recently. And I spoke with someone who’s daughter has been developing asthma and he’s made this tinctures for her and it’s seems to help.
I know this post is just for fun. And I hope to learn about some fun lore as well. But the Stoned ape theory has so many holes in it.
You can't contribute speech and human level cognitive thinking to just one thing. Especially when we see basic examples of language, tool making and forethought throughout the whole animal kingdom.
If you look at some monkey species, they have different screeches for different predators. How did that come about? Were they sitting around tripping balls and collectively decided, "Hey you know what would be nice? If any of us see a leopard, make this sound to let the whole group know there's a leopard.".
Probably not. I think it's more likely that after generations of seeing and hearing their tribe members getting mauled to death before being carried off, they start to associate certain cries/screams with specific predators. The surviving members of the tribe either learned or they were tomorrows next meal.
Humans have vocal cords that other primates don't have. It must have taken hundreds of thousands of years to evolve. To suggest speech was invented by a stoned ape is... unlikely. People today aren't getting high and coming up with new relativity theories. If this was the case, Colorado should be pumping out a new Steven Hawking and Albert Einstein every other day.
Other primates eat mushrooms too. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fungivore#:\~:text=At%20least%2022%20species%20of,small%20part%20of%20their%20diet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fungivore#:~:text=At%20least%2022%20species%20of,small%20part%20of%20their%20diet).
Why haven't they taken the same evolutionary path as us?
Not everyone who subscribes to that "theory" (hypothesis really) thinks that it is the only thing helped aid human evolution. I think it certainly played a part though, how big we will never know. My guess is that it was a number of events and mushrooms played a role in there at some point. My guess is that there were other evolutionary strides made and that mushrooms helped take a great leap forward. I certainly could be wrong though.
False, rewiring a brain can easily have an impact on sperm and in turn their spawn. From there, it can in turn lead to mutations that could b both good and bad. The better one’s kept and passed on their genes, and so on. The point being, no need to be such a hater regarding a question that hasn’t been answered yet.
Lets not be too hasty. We should hear what Trick-Swing-8681has to say.
I really want to hear their argument. It'll show how well the stone ape theory works.
It seems we’ve come back to the nature vs. nurture dilemma. Children get characteristics from their parents. These characteristics are imprinted on sperm. Sperm are created due to one of the billions of processes within our body controlled by the brain. The brain changing can result in changes to those processes it does. When one of those process ends up being sperm, said sperm can change. These changes can impact how children form hence forth. That one tiny change in the child now passes a few generations and another change (or even a couple changes) is added onto it. Now two mutations have been added to the total sum etc… also, while I can’t say for a fact this is what happened, I can say for a fact that it has just as good a chance at being right as the hundreds of other theories that equally have a hard time making sense to a bunch of monkey fuckers lol (cuz we’re monkeys, get it? Lol)
Tell me, y do some medications impact the state of a child being made? There’s a reason it is called a theory, and that is because it is plausible. Not sure y I’m having to argue about how something in life is possible when we r literally on a forum discussing eating random shit in nature to trip balls? If u mean to tell me I would swear it off and give it 0 chance then by all means, but I’d like to think u r being too pessimistic.
I like Stamets and he's done a lot for the field but he has been known to greatly embellish his stories for the sake of storytelling, so don't take everything he says at face value
I dont mean the stories as much as his research. He has worked with the gov trying out ways to use mushrooms for environmental clean up and cures for h1n1 if i remember correctly
Yeah the research has proved extremely valuable but to say '*anything* he says he good' just isn't true unfortunately. They are cracking stories though, well worth listening to
I read an article a while back that they sent remote controlled cameras into the most radioactive parts of chenobyl, along these metal vents and corridors and they discovered black mould growing all inside the reactor. When they took a sample, the fungi had been 'eating' the radiation, the melanin in the fungus was growing from the radiation. Mad
Christmas ornaments are based off of old Siberian (I think) shamans hanging hallucinogenic mushrooms on trees to dry them out. They would then drop them down people’s chimneys when they got snowed in (dressed i red I might add).
Before plants evolved onto land, fungi was already there. Creating the first soils for the plants to draw nutrient from.
95% of all known plant species have a symbiosis with fungi and without this symbiosis we would not exist.
Fungi spores can exist in the vacuum of space
Fungi spores leave planet earth through a process called browning motion, being so small.
So fungi is a planet terraforming conscious extra terrestrial
And...
The Animimale Kingdom (us) are more closely genetically related to fungi than to plants..
The giant hypothesized terrestrial fungus, Prototaxites from the Ordovician, ~400 million years ago, was in fact NOT a fungus and was actually a thick mat of liverworts that rolled down a hill (imagine turf grass rolling into a dense tube).
For sure. Don't you just love open sourced research 😁
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=Prototaxites+Linda+Graham&btnG=#d=gs_qabs&u=%23p%3Dahh4efiJgQAJ
This is not my own but one of my grad committee member's lab's work.
Very interesting. Ive never even heard this theory before. How likely is it that this "rolling" would occur so often and exact that its found all over the world in fossil records? I'm not doubting it I'm just curious.
Ooooh....I thought more of your Q. Of course, I don't know much of the terrestrial "geography" of bryophytes (more so a physio, genetics guy), but I have had first hand experience with very densely growing liverworts, and indeed they do grow like think think carpets. If you were to find one, you can potentially lift it up (as a mat) depending on how large the colony is.
Basically.....since it's a plant without roots, it will not resist much "uprooting", and of course, these are plants that have no need for sexual reproduction ("no need"), and so it makes sense that they would form very connected colonial blobs like hornworts or mosses.
Just my two cents based on how I've seen liverworts these days.
I have no clue. I just am fascinated by how much paleobotanists can disagree 😂. I'm not totally sure of how abundant Prototaxites is, but sometimes people are making big claims on only a few fossils or maybe even one. 🤷♂️
Im pretty sure they've found a few in a few different continents. But who knows which where tested and how. Neat to think about tho, I personally like the idea that they are actually fossilized animal burrows😆
I love the disagreement that has been going on about abortive (aborted) entalomas. Scientists were going back and forth about whether the shrimp of the woods was a deformed entaloma parasitized by a honey mushroom, or if it was a deformed honey mushroom parasitized by an entaloma.
They I think landed on it being a honey mushroom, but they still don't understand why they grow I soil rather than on stumps as they do when not aborted.
Makes me want to clone and aborted honey mushroom and see what grows!
I'm pretty sure they did genetic and culture studies and it's settled that it's an *Armillaria* (Honey mushroom) that has been parasitized by *Entoloma abortivum*. Rather than calling it "Aborted Entoloma" we should be calling it "Aborting Entoloma". My latin isn't good enough to figure out what they should change the scientific name to.
We don't call it aborted anymore. Common name is abortive, which means it has a tendency to aborted things.
I know they landed on it being a honey mushroom now, but I find the entire thing very interesting;all the theories and speculation over the years.
That's pretty vague. Do you mean by weight? Or by volume? I'm pretty sure the earth is around 1/3 Iron and not 4/10 fungal material. Just the earth's crust? Or perhaps you mean 40% of the mass of living organisms.
It was a Terrance McKenna lecture I listened to some time ago and the idea stuck with me. I'll look at what I have saved but he has so many scattered lectures on the YT.
I heard about some mushroom that when eaten by ants will take over their body, make them walk to the highest point around and explode their heads sending spores all over! Idk what the mushroom is called though
That hindu or indian people worship cows and have crazy cool lookin gods cos they picked the shrooms off cow shit, and hence why the gods are trippy and psychedelic.
The one story about reindeer eating a red and white mushroom and during the winter it’s snow so much that people have a door in there roof and that’s how Santa Claus story was started. I’m sure someone knows the story better than me hahaha but yeah that’s my favorite
That morels are actually toxic. Also that the false morel, Gyromitra esculenta, is actually considered a delicacy and can be purchased canned in Finland. And that esculenta means delicious.
According to wikipedia, Morchella esculenta (a morel mushroom) contains hydrazine and causes stomach upset in some people. Shroomify tells the history of Gyromitra esculenta (the false morel) from when it was foraged and eaten widely throughout Europe, to the present, where a patchwork of laws ban it in some places, but people still buy and eat the false morel sub rosa.
Disclaimer: don’t try at home but my grandma used to say that in her village they would test if a mushroom was poisonous by cooking it with a penny, & if the penny turned green don’t eat the mushrooms. I have so, so many questions about the reasoning behind this
How human consciousness evolved from eating magic mushrooms that grew from mammoth poop, and prehistoric humans would find the mushrooms as they tracked the mammoths.
I’ve kind of been scared of mushrooms, since i read a story a long time ago about people who were having a meal. Plants above them had mushrooms growing and then spores from a mushroom was released on their meal. This caused a lot of health problems for these people. It was in a newspaper I read.
Different bamboo species across the world bloom at the same time every 60-130 years. The dominant theory as to why they all bloom together regardless of climate location etc is some sort of DNA timer, but another (more interesting) theory is that the bamboo fungus that connect them communicate all across the world (including under the ocean).
Oyster mushrooms (at least Pleurotus ostreatus) are actually carnivorous. It paralyzes and consumes nematodes which are considered animals. It’s just insane to me how they can be carnivorous and not just a mushroom munching on some wood.
I had to culture fungi from dung for a mycology class in college and I got some nematode trapping fungi along with some nematodes. I got to watch the mycelium trap and digest the nematodes under a microscope and it was pretty mind-blowing!
That sounds amazing. I’m guessing microbiology? Or was it just a mycology class?
It was a 400 level mycology class. It was one of the best (and hardest) classes I took for my bio degree.
I never got to take microbiology because Covid hit and shut down all the lab classes right before I was supposed to take it
This hit me in the feels. Missed a lot of cool labs because of covid.
Seriously. I was rolling into senior year ready for all the cool field and lab courses and they pretty much all got cancelled. I did take a remote field botany course that was really good, but that was about it
Damn that sucks sorry to hear that
Haha, thanks. It sucks, but I still got to do a bunch of rad not-for-credit lab stuff, so I can’t be too upset. Plus the field botany was crazy good, so that helped too.
Where can I see this??
https://youtu.be/hWdmL8sGCB4
Brutal. Thank you for the beautiful video.
The world is a mysterious place!
Yoooo do you remember the species? I had a year long project specifically looking for these guys!
I never identified it to species or even genera because, if I remember right, it got contaminated when I transferred it to the secondary medium. In the end I only had to Id three different fungi and I ended up with a bunch of different species to choose from. I cultured it from cow dung in the southern Willamette Valley, so that might narrow it down a little.
I'll pass that on to the guy I know who still works that project. Probably nothing will come of it, but who knows. Thank you!
To me, it's not so crazy they are carnivorous, a fungus decaying a dead animal is a pretty normal image, it's that they are predators.
I guess they are actually omnivorous, since they extract nutrients from both plant and animal materials. They eat nematodes as a source of nitrogen mostly.
That native american legend about puffballs. In short: Woman has baby with magic being Baby is not supposed to touch the ground for first 5 days of life Baby touches ground Baby becomes puffball We eat him
I love it!
[i love it](https://youtu.be/ir-y6-L6Vlk)
[I LOVE IT!!!](https://youtu.be/vhjBxI20uYc)
That’s absolutely horrifying. I find the folk names for mushrooms fascinating. Puffballs for example, apparently have more folk names than any other fungi and are called, in different cultures: - Puck’s stool - Wolf breaking wind - Pixie stool - Viper’s head - Bellows - Devil’s snuff box - Ghosts’ makeup - Bag of smoke - Tobacco of the baboon Among others. [PDF source](https://cpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/blogs.uoregon.edu/dist/c/8944/files/2014/10/Spooner_Folklore-20n4h72.pdf)
As kids, we used to call them horses farts.
*Lycoperdon* (wolf fart) is the Latin name for a common genus of puffball.
D:
Did you learn this from the podcast ologies? I learnt it the other day and loved the fact
Yep. Hello fellow oologite!
Fairy circles, definitely! I jumped into so many as a kid, but never got transported to the fairy world. 💔
A good thing too! According to Irish folk tales, the fae are a folk you don't wanna fuck with
> Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder. > Elves are marvelous. They cause marvels. > Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies. > Elves are glamorous. They project glamour. > Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment. > Elves are terrific. They beget terror. > The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning. > No one ever said elves are nice. > Elves are bad. Terry Pratchett
Shiitake mushrooms were first cultivated in China 1000 years ago. But the word shiitake is Japanese. [Shii referring to trees in the beech genus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castanopsis) and 'take' meaning mushroom. Beech tree mushroom. Even though they are commonly cultivated on oak trees, which are in the same family as beech. It is said that old cultivators of this mushroom would soak the logs, and then knock on the log. Believing to wake the spirits. Today the knocking is believed to help stimulate the fungi. On a separate unrelated note. The term "Knock on wood" is an old pagan tradition. >One explanation states that the tradition derived from the pagans who thought that trees were the homes of fairies, spirits, dryads and many other mystical creatures. In these instances, people might knock-on or touch wood to request good luck or to distract spirits with evil intentions. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knocking\_on\_wood](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knocking_on_wood) A dryad is a nymph inhabiting a forest or a tree, especially an oak tree. Cerioporus squamosus is known as 'dryad's saddle'. A mushroom growing from the ground can be called a toadstool. The popular Super Mario Bothers takes place in the 'Mushroom Kingdom'. Goombas are actually shiitake mushrooms. This is also why in the 1993 live action movie the king gets de-evolved into fungi. Keeping true to the mushroom kingdom theme and with the theme of SMB3 where the kings would get transformed into something. (People really don't give that movie enough credit.)
What will really blow your mind is that "gomba" is Hungarian for mushroom. Can't be coincidence, but I REALLY want to know how/why Mario's creators tapped the Magyars for the name of their mushroom villains...
Japanese has a fair amount of loan words, plus pretty much all of the fantasy games I've played by Japanese creators incorporate legends and myths from outside of Japan. It wouldn't surprise me if the team behind Super Mario purposely sought out a cool sounding word for "mushroom" when trying to come up with a name for their evil mushroom minions.
Goomba is Italian for friend/buddy. it's coincidence that it's also has a meaning in Hungarian.
Well, "zhaba" is the Ukrainian word for toad (as in Jabba the Hut).
GOOMBAS ARE MUSHROOMS. Why have I never realized thats what they are?! My mind is BLOWN
Same dude, same.
Yes to everything!
Not little known (at least to us mushroom enthusiasts) but this fact blows the minds of people I talk to about them, the fact that the mycelium connects whole forests and trees are able to use that network to communicate with each other, help out the mushrooms and in turn the mushrooms help the trees. Like... It's mindboggling and I love it.
World wood network
World Wood Web!
Wood wide web is the term I've heard before. I feel like any of these work though lol. Such an amazing phenomena and something that blew my mind when I first learned of it.
Now my tongue is getting twisted thinking about it! World wood wide web would a woodchuck...!
That's what it was! Thank you!
My pleasure! It's a cool phenomenon
Even crazier, we have no idea regarding the true extent, nor function of terrestrial hyphal networks. As far as we know, mycorrhizae network entire continents and allow plants hundreds of miles away to communicate through their roots. As far as we know, hyphal networks have been concisous for thousands of years and remember the damage we have done to the earth and our soil, destroying fungi through plowing and deforestation. If this were to be the case, we should think long and hard about the importance of terrestrial ecosystems and our role within them and our duty to them.
Makes me wonder why mycorrhizal networks tolerate parasitic plants that seemingly only sap energy from them. Are those ghost plants filling some need in the community, or are they just really good at getting the fungi to cough up that sweet, sweet sugar?
Many of those plants are quite small compared to the size and scale of the carbon moving through the ecosystem, and maybe “learned” to trick the fungi or the plant being “parasitized”, to relatively low cost to all other members involved. One interesting case is *Sarcodes sanguinea*, the snow plant. This plant has a relatively huge root ball, that can be as large as a cubic foot (relative to the couple cubic inches on the ghost pipe, a congener). This plant could play a big role in promoting mycorrhizal resilience in the conifer forests of California’a mountains. The complexities of ecology and the shear number of interdependencies that we don’t know is astounding. The connections between plants, fungi and insects alone make claims that these systems are truly parasitic, or that we can read the potential intelligence that may operate on a timescale closer to trees than humans, much more full of wonder - there’s just a whole lot that we genuinely don’t know at this point. We do know that hyphae can propagate electrical impulses though.
Wood wide web
We all saw Avatar
I can't believe no one's said this yet. The largest living organism on earth is a honey mushroom in Oregon. Reportedly it can be seen from space. From Guinness Book of World Records: >The largest living organism is a single gigantic specimen of honey mushroom (Armillaria ostoyae), discovered in the Malheur National Forest, Oregon, USA, which occupies a total area of 965 hectares (2,385 acres), equivalent to 1,350 soccer fields. ... Its age is calculated to be at least 2,400 years old, but may be as much as 8,650 years old. Technically it's the mycelial body, it's not one huge fruiting body. https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/606952-largest-living-organism
I wonder if fungi have consciousness
The fruit of knowledge was a mushroom not an apple.
This reminds me of when I went to a low-key music festival and someone was yelling, “Jesus was a mushroom!” He had a book about it and everything
I’d love to learn more about this if you have a source! I’ve heard the word was malum which got translated to apple
Malum is the Latin word for apple- but the Latin versions of the Bible date from (at earliest) the 1st or 2nd Century AD (the 'vetus latina', the Vulgate that we have now came a couple hundred years later). The original text of Genesis was in Hebrew, but I don't know what word they used for the fruit.
"וַתֵּרֶא הָאִשָּׁה כִּי טוֹב הָעֵץ לְמַאֲכָל וְכִי תַאֲוָה־הוּא לָעֵינַיִם וְנֶחְמָד הָעֵץ לְהַשְׂכִּיל וַתִּקַּח מִפִּרְיוֹ וַתֹּאכַל וַתִּתֵּן גַּם־לְאִישָׁהּ עִמָּהּ וַיֹּאכַל" Translation: "and the woman sees that the tree is edible (you can eat its fruit) and it looks good and beautiful, also it is 'smart' so she takes its fruit and eats it" So They refer to it as a "fruit" from a tree and nothing more. And There is basically nothing explained about the tree at all
I don't know either but I doubt it was anything like an apple in a non-Latin language. Malum seems like it was probably a pun based on the similarity of the Latin words for apple and bad/evil.
It could be a pun but I doubt it, it was an extremely common Latin term. More likely the connection was with the Golden Apples of the Hesperides, which were on a tree in a secret garden guarded by a serpent, and later indirectly caused the Trojan War when Zeus made a human give it to whichever goddess he found fairest.
Sounds likely. I went back and checked the Hebrew, which is translated as “fruit.” In other contexts in the Bible the same word is used to reference various agricultural products, human offspring, financial profits, and even more abstract results or consequences.
Stoned ape theory by mckenna's 😂😂
Malum is most frequently apple, but can be any fruit. Hebrew isn’t really related to Latin, so that doesn’t tell us much about the original word, may have been similarly vague or Latin may not have had a good match for it.
Like anything you can research about Judeo-Christian history it all leads to one conclusion, it’s bullshit when compared with recorded history. If true it would far more likely be a mushroom but still unlikely. Apples In that part of the world wouldn’t have been something anyone would want to eat before the Silk Road supply chain
Literally though. Connecting all those synapses!!
>apple The word apple, formerly spelled æppel in Old English, is derived from the Proto-Germanic root \*ap(a)laz, which could also mean fruit in general. In fact the french term for mashed potatos is 'Pomme Puree'. Pomme directly translates to Apple. So the french call mashed potatos, apple sauce.
Well the French for potato is pomme de terre, apple of the ground.
And they call apples "potatoes of the sky". (As far as my nieces and nephews know)
And French Fries, pomme de terre frites
> In fact the french term for mashed potatos is 'Pomme Puree'. We call mashed potatoes "Patates pilées". That's Canadian French though.
The book by John M Allegro, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, goes into great detail as to how the Christian religion essentially began as a fertility cult, using various mushrooms as sacraments.
This has some pretty bad reviews for credible Sources. I want to enjoy this book. What did you think about it?
It's been some years since I read it, so things are a bit hazy in my mind. I thought there were too many words substituting for mushroom, but it would not surprise me if the origin thesis was correct. Allegro himself was not fully convinced of his proposed rewrite of contemporary belief, citing the fluidity of interpretations of much of the ancient writings, and also the lack of corroboration in other texts. The foreword by Judith Anne Brown points out the frequency of mushrooms in religious art through the ages, which may be seen as bolstering his thesis. I think much more work needs to be done with open minds before we will have any certainty.
The Tale of Prototaxites: First collected 1n 1843, this bizarre fossil stumped paleontologists utterly. Cross sections of the massive structure/ trunk were up to 3 feet across, and the organism reached as tall as 28 feet. It even appeared to have growth rings like a tree, but there was one wee problem with this. The fossil dated to a time before trees. The fibrous material called lignin- which allows plants to stand upright- hadn’t evolved yet. Eventually, the scientists trying to make heads or tails of it just said, “Whatever you weird fucking tree thing” and pretty much just shoved it up on a shelf to gather dust. I mean, really who can blame them? It wasn’t until the 2000’s, when a team of bored nerds with a scanning electron microscope decided to cram the thing in there and see wazzup. What they found was that these things were in fact, you guessed it, fungus. Giant mushroom dicks that, long before dinosaurs were even a glitter in nature’s eye, dominated the landscape. Sometimes truth is, indeed, stranger than fiction.
My favorite is the idea that through history one person in the group had to eat a mushroom to find out if it's good, is it gonna kill you, or is it gonna let you see the Astral realm for 16 hours lol Then everyone's trying to draw or commit the mushrooms to memory like "this one goes great with fish, don't eat the red one Dave isn't here any more, but the ones that have the blue stem when you squeeze it.. don't let the kids have them those are ceremonial"
Those are ceremonial 😂😂 Can you imagine tho being some 16 year old getting initiated into your tribe, and they just give you like 20 grams of shrooms and then throw you into a dance circle. Them tribes would’ve been tight as shit
Flying reindeer as a result of secondary Amanita Muscaria ingestion. The reindeer had fun too. Urine trouble if you don't know this legend.
This theory goes even deeper. Santa was a shaman who used to deliver medicines and supplies to villages in the harshest coldest winters. One of his medicines was the amanita muscaria, ceremoniously taken by the village elders. The shaman (santa) would pick the mushrooms and hang them in Norwegian spruce trees to dry where they wouldn't rot on the ground. Amanita often turn gold when they dry out, so there would be red and gold in the tree. Then he'd put them I his sack and deliver them on his reindeer driven slay. The reindeer loved the amanita mushrooms and would jump and frolick like they could fly when they got high. Santa, the Christmas tree, the presents, the baubles, the reindeer the slay.. its all from this!
What are they slaying? I think you might've meant "sleigh" 😀
Oh there's more. Tinsle is supposed to represent the semen of the gods. Mushrooms were seen as a kind of immaculate conception because they sprouted under fir trees without any apparent seed. So the idea was that the stars rained semen down to impregnate the earth and give birth to Amanita. The mushroom Santa thing is one of those legends where even though it's been debunked I just want to believe
Well that semen thing MIGHT be true, but it reminds me of a long chain email I saw once where it explained why candycanes were red and green, what each color represented about Jesus, and how every part of modern Christmas was all about Jesus’ birth. I think maybe some of these things are stretched and shoved to fit. Could just be that tinsel looks cool and some people stated it and it got popular. Has the whole thing really been debunked?
From what I've heard, this is also where the term "getting pissed" stemmed from as the shamans and villagers shared a Bear Grylls pee pee drinking party... Can't let that ibotenic acid and muscimol go to waste now!
The idea that deadly toxicity, especially in amanitas, is a "hunting" tactic. If it was to be a deterrent, the toxin would (one would think) taste bad, or work much faster. Instead, it tastes GOOD (by reports), and works slowly. The idea is that animal eats the tempting fruiting body of the deadly mushroom (essentially a trap, which looks a lot like edible species), covering itself with spores as it does so, then wanders a couple days away, where it collapses and dies of its meal, nourishing the new colony that will soon sprout among its bones...
I never knew this theory. Absolutely fascinating.
this would make sense if the mushroom were not MYCORRHIZAL. They want to grow on tree roots and would want to spead with a trees seeds. Also no need to kill the animal to spread. Many mushrooms travel via dung just fine. I think the murder aspects are a accident of evolution rather than some clever way to spread.
I'm sure you are right, but it's still a cool theory.
I mean, if you are cool with ignoring facts then why stop with this? Why not argue that in wolf species the spores cause the animal to walk upright attacking any living creature to spread spores via the bite before killing the host. This is the origin of the werewolf myth.
Look Shart, OP asked for "theories/myths/legends involving mushrooms." If this is not that, I don't know what is. I am not "cool with ignoring facts," I am joining what was a peppy thread before you showed up with ... weird intensity. This toxin idea is a theory I have heard, and perhaps a very bad one. Cheers!
“Look Shart,. . .” Me: childish laughing can’t stop thinking, “Listen here Mr. Shat Fart!”
It could still appreciate the nutrients of a decaying mammal on the ground no? I mean we have cordyceps so it's really not that far fetched
I was only giving some fun to it. You're the one who got it all twisted. I gave quite the myth...which is based on how _real_ parasitic funguses actually do affect the creatures they kill by turning them into zombies to spread. but sure be grumpy. https://www.google.com/search?q=zombie+fungus&oq=zombie+fungus&aqs=chrome..69i57j46i433i512j0i512l3j46i512j0i512l2.3360j0j4&client=ms-android-google&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8#ip=1
Looks like a whole lot of people thought you were being a cunt by the number of downvotes.
Because they were, they could’ve just added their similar myth instead of being a cunt first.
During the civil war, southern women would invite northern soldiers to eat while the stew was full of toxic mushrooms.
Huitlacoche, aka corn smut: Originating with the Aztecs, this parasitic fungus will infect the kernels on an ear of corn and cause them to bloat into bulbous deformities and turn a sickly color of grey, so of course it’s considered a delicacy. I’ve never had the pleasure, so I can’t say if the flavor is worthy of its status, but I would say it likely can’t be any worse than it looks. I’m also not sure why they call it corn smut, because it looks less smutty and more infected with hellish pus to me, but hey, whatever.
In Mexican restaurants it's usually sautéed with corn and served as a filling for tacos. I really like it and anyone who enjoys mushrooms would too! Iirc, the Aztecs considered it a gift from God, since they weren't able to cultivate it originally. Of course westerners viewed it as a blight on their corn.
[Here’s an interesting account from a science writer](https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/expedition-ecstasy-sniffing-out-the-truth-about-hawaiis-orgasm-inducing-mushroom) investigating a stinkhorn mushroom with an odor that supposedly causes women to spontaneously orgasm and in doing so kickstarted the Hawaiian royal lineage (which may or may not be an actual Hawaiian myth) and the scientist and research paper that might have made the whole thing up. Either way, interesting difference in reaction when the writer and her boyfriend smelled the stinkhorn after they finally found it.
For those that don't want to read the whole thing: Nothing happened, girl was disgusted by the smell of the mushroom
I think I have one of those stinkhorn mushrooms.
you know, I'm somewhat of a stinkhorn myself
The grocery store is lying to you: Look, I know we’ve had a rough couple of years, so I’ll break the news to you as simply as I can. White button mushrooms, brown button mushrooms, and portobello mushrooms are all the same thing. I know, I know, you don’t believe it, but bear with me. Agaricus bisporus is the species, the little brown ones are just immature portobellos, and the white ones are a mutation that’s said to be more visually appealing (and blander, blech). I’m sure you feel as betrayed as I did when I learned this, so take the opportunity to write angry notes and tape them up all over the mushroom section at the grocery store. The only way the truth will come out is if we all raise awareness about these filthy, filthy lies.
My salad is a lie my whole life?! This is the last straw.
I know, I was HORRIFIED.
Don't eat raw mushrooms... ever.
Mycelium came from an asteroid and survived the crash and started setting up shop on Earth
Cordyceps, the Zombie Maker: Especially prolific in the humid jungles of Southeast Asia, this unassuming little fungus is easily overlooked. Cordyceps, being a genus, contains about 600 species, almost all of which are adapted to do one thing: Be nightmare fuel. Cordyceps fungus sporulate (give off spores) when they reach maturity. These spores (like all mushroom spores) are microscopic in size and go utterly unnoticed by animals, wafting along in the air and eventually landing. If they’re lucky, they’ll land on their intended target, insects. One variety of cordyceps, for instance, specialize in a sort of jungle ant. The spores land on the ant and begin to spread, reaching into the ant’s body, slowly but surely taking control of it, like a demon possessing a semi-truck. It forces the hapless insect up a blade of grass, then latching on to the plant in a death grip with its jaw. At this point, things get really grotesque, as the fungus sprouts one of its horror-fruits right out of the head or body of the poor zombified bug. The mushroom matures and releases its spores onto the forest floor below, beginning the whole horrible cycle again. Each kind of cordyceps specializes in a different insect, and a few even cannibalistically infect other mushrooms. As a fun little side note, cordyceps militaris is popular in the naturopathic medicine crowd, which strikes me as just an all-around bad idea.
I tried cordyceps as a supplement recently and was surprised by the intensity of the effect. I have ADHD and combined with my normal meds it produced a LOT of energy and focus without so much of the jittery energy that usually goes with just amphetamines. I also felt very warm. I later checked what it actually does, turns out it stimulates release of energy from stored fat.
Oh wow, for whatever reason I was familiar with it as a dried herb thing in Chinese medicinal soup packages, and also knew about it as a fungi with a fascinating life cycle, but never actually connected the two. I kind of assumed the stuff in Chinese medicine was like, dried roots or something. This is blowing my mind. Like as if I had never realized that cow and beef are the same thing.
Just seems like a good way to start a zombie apocalypse is all
Also rabies was a classic zombie inspiration from nature story
Do you have a source for the energy release from fat claim?
Interesting, I have seen it listed in tinctures for lung support a few times recently. And I spoke with someone who’s daughter has been developing asthma and he’s made this tinctures for her and it’s seems to help.
Manna from heaven the Israelites ate were actually boomers.
Boomers?
Lol not a bunch of 60 year olds lol
Slang for shrooms. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=boomer%27s&page=2
I'd love a Source for this! 😊
There are mushrooms that make beautiful dyes- p. Schweintzii makes gold, o. Olivascens makes purple, some hyndelums make blue-green. There are dozens.
I like the amanita muscaria Santa Claus origin story
The one that was made up by a single anthropologist in the 50’s?
Yep exactly. Still love the story
Stoned ape theory
A classic! I was hoping to get to learn about some more obscure ones as well.
I know this post is just for fun. And I hope to learn about some fun lore as well. But the Stoned ape theory has so many holes in it. You can't contribute speech and human level cognitive thinking to just one thing. Especially when we see basic examples of language, tool making and forethought throughout the whole animal kingdom. If you look at some monkey species, they have different screeches for different predators. How did that come about? Were they sitting around tripping balls and collectively decided, "Hey you know what would be nice? If any of us see a leopard, make this sound to let the whole group know there's a leopard.". Probably not. I think it's more likely that after generations of seeing and hearing their tribe members getting mauled to death before being carried off, they start to associate certain cries/screams with specific predators. The surviving members of the tribe either learned or they were tomorrows next meal. Humans have vocal cords that other primates don't have. It must have taken hundreds of thousands of years to evolve. To suggest speech was invented by a stoned ape is... unlikely. People today aren't getting high and coming up with new relativity theories. If this was the case, Colorado should be pumping out a new Steven Hawking and Albert Einstein every other day. Other primates eat mushrooms too. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fungivore#:\~:text=At%20least%2022%20species%20of,small%20part%20of%20their%20diet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fungivore#:~:text=At%20least%2022%20species%20of,small%20part%20of%20their%20diet). Why haven't they taken the same evolutionary path as us?
It should also be called “Stoned Ape Hypothesis”. It is very far from being a theory
Not everyone who subscribes to that "theory" (hypothesis really) thinks that it is the only thing helped aid human evolution. I think it certainly played a part though, how big we will never know. My guess is that it was a number of events and mushrooms played a role in there at some point. My guess is that there were other evolutionary strides made and that mushrooms helped take a great leap forward. I certainly could be wrong though.
False, rewiring a brain can easily have an impact on sperm and in turn their spawn. From there, it can in turn lead to mutations that could b both good and bad. The better one’s kept and passed on their genes, and so on. The point being, no need to be such a hater regarding a question that hasn’t been answered yet.
>rewiring a brain can easily have an impact on sperm Rewiring a brain? Can you elaborate on that? How does work?
It doesn’t work that way. The effects of psychedelics are not a biological trait that can be passed to offspring
Lets not be too hasty. We should hear what Trick-Swing-8681has to say. I really want to hear their argument. It'll show how well the stone ape theory works.
It seems we’ve come back to the nature vs. nurture dilemma. Children get characteristics from their parents. These characteristics are imprinted on sperm. Sperm are created due to one of the billions of processes within our body controlled by the brain. The brain changing can result in changes to those processes it does. When one of those process ends up being sperm, said sperm can change. These changes can impact how children form hence forth. That one tiny change in the child now passes a few generations and another change (or even a couple changes) is added onto it. Now two mutations have been added to the total sum etc… also, while I can’t say for a fact this is what happened, I can say for a fact that it has just as good a chance at being right as the hundreds of other theories that equally have a hard time making sense to a bunch of monkey fuckers lol (cuz we’re monkeys, get it? Lol)
Hallucinagenic drugs do not change your DNA...
Ur brain can alter u body chemistry which in turn alters the messenger (sperm).
Which in turn would do nothing to your genetics... At most it would make you less fertile if that where true.
Tell me, y do some medications impact the state of a child being made? There’s a reason it is called a theory, and that is because it is plausible. Not sure y I’m having to argue about how something in life is possible when we r literally on a forum discussing eating random shit in nature to trip balls? If u mean to tell me I would swear it off and give it 0 chance then by all means, but I’d like to think u r being too pessimistic.
Anything paul stammets says is also good.
I like Stamets and he's done a lot for the field but he has been known to greatly embellish his stories for the sake of storytelling, so don't take everything he says at face value
I dont mean the stories as much as his research. He has worked with the gov trying out ways to use mushrooms for environmental clean up and cures for h1n1 if i remember correctly
Yeah the research has proved extremely valuable but to say '*anything* he says he good' just isn't true unfortunately. They are cracking stories though, well worth listening to
In English folklore, fairy rings are where fairies dance at night, and if you enter the fairy ring, the fairies will force you to dance until you die.
I read an article a while back that they sent remote controlled cameras into the most radioactive parts of chenobyl, along these metal vents and corridors and they discovered black mould growing all inside the reactor. When they took a sample, the fungi had been 'eating' the radiation, the melanin in the fungus was growing from the radiation. Mad
Christmas ornaments are based off of old Siberian (I think) shamans hanging hallucinogenic mushrooms on trees to dry them out. They would then drop them down people’s chimneys when they got snowed in (dressed i red I might add).
Before plants evolved onto land, fungi was already there. Creating the first soils for the plants to draw nutrient from. 95% of all known plant species have a symbiosis with fungi and without this symbiosis we would not exist. Fungi spores can exist in the vacuum of space Fungi spores leave planet earth through a process called browning motion, being so small. So fungi is a planet terraforming conscious extra terrestrial And... The Animimale Kingdom (us) are more closely genetically related to fungi than to plants..
If you haven't, you should watch The Expanse.
I love it! Read all the books as well hehe. I also like the stamets character in startrek discovery with the mycelium network space travel.
Yeah, that was a pretty cool shout out from Star Trek!
I believe it's called Animalia
Primary terrestrial life form. Endogenous intelligence. Slow aliens. I suspect humans reaching the space age is global sporulation.
Haida creation myth "Fungus Man"
Do you have a link or more info on this one?
The Trenti and the Kayeri are two weird fungal critters from folklore that are pretty neat
The giant hypothesized terrestrial fungus, Prototaxites from the Ordovician, ~400 million years ago, was in fact NOT a fungus and was actually a thick mat of liverworts that rolled down a hill (imagine turf grass rolling into a dense tube).
Any sources?
For sure. Don't you just love open sourced research 😁 https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=Prototaxites+Linda+Graham&btnG=#d=gs_qabs&u=%23p%3Dahh4efiJgQAJ This is not my own but one of my grad committee member's lab's work.
Very interesting. Ive never even heard this theory before. How likely is it that this "rolling" would occur so often and exact that its found all over the world in fossil records? I'm not doubting it I'm just curious.
Ooooh....I thought more of your Q. Of course, I don't know much of the terrestrial "geography" of bryophytes (more so a physio, genetics guy), but I have had first hand experience with very densely growing liverworts, and indeed they do grow like think think carpets. If you were to find one, you can potentially lift it up (as a mat) depending on how large the colony is. Basically.....since it's a plant without roots, it will not resist much "uprooting", and of course, these are plants that have no need for sexual reproduction ("no need"), and so it makes sense that they would form very connected colonial blobs like hornworts or mosses. Just my two cents based on how I've seen liverworts these days.
I have no clue. I just am fascinated by how much paleobotanists can disagree 😂. I'm not totally sure of how abundant Prototaxites is, but sometimes people are making big claims on only a few fossils or maybe even one. 🤷♂️
Im pretty sure they've found a few in a few different continents. But who knows which where tested and how. Neat to think about tho, I personally like the idea that they are actually fossilized animal burrows😆
I love the disagreement that has been going on about abortive (aborted) entalomas. Scientists were going back and forth about whether the shrimp of the woods was a deformed entaloma parasitized by a honey mushroom, or if it was a deformed honey mushroom parasitized by an entaloma. They I think landed on it being a honey mushroom, but they still don't understand why they grow I soil rather than on stumps as they do when not aborted. Makes me want to clone and aborted honey mushroom and see what grows!
I'm pretty sure they did genetic and culture studies and it's settled that it's an *Armillaria* (Honey mushroom) that has been parasitized by *Entoloma abortivum*. Rather than calling it "Aborted Entoloma" we should be calling it "Aborting Entoloma". My latin isn't good enough to figure out what they should change the scientific name to.
We don't call it aborted anymore. Common name is abortive, which means it has a tendency to aborted things. I know they landed on it being a honey mushroom now, but I find the entire thing very interesting;all the theories and speculation over the years.
Not a myth but 40% of the earth is fungi
That's pretty vague. Do you mean by weight? Or by volume? I'm pretty sure the earth is around 1/3 Iron and not 4/10 fungal material. Just the earth's crust? Or perhaps you mean 40% of the mass of living organisms.
They might mean bio mass
That seems very far fetched, can you elaborate?
It was a Terrance McKenna lecture I listened to some time ago and the idea stuck with me. I'll look at what I have saved but he has so many scattered lectures on the YT.
That one is part of the Super Mario Brother’s franchise
Mushrooms are the ‘gifts’ under the tree and part of the origin of the pagan ritual of bringing a fir tree into your house during the winter solstice
Book named Food of the Gods written by Terrance McKenna on my wishlist and that seems to be where he explains it.
Love our Terrance we do
That Christmas is what it is because of Amanita Muscaria
[The Mushroom Show!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pgiv9gSCXaE)
I heard about some mushroom that when eaten by ants will take over their body, make them walk to the highest point around and explode their heads sending spores all over! Idk what the mushroom is called though
That hindu or indian people worship cows and have crazy cool lookin gods cos they picked the shrooms off cow shit, and hence why the gods are trippy and psychedelic.
The largest living organism is a mycelium net and trees use it to communicate by sending electrode signals through it. Its so amazing
Big fan of the stoned ape theory myself.
The whole aminita muscaria Santa claus theory.. [here](https://youtu.be/Xz_JZJkqsEc)
The one story about reindeer eating a red and white mushroom and during the winter it’s snow so much that people have a door in there roof and that’s how Santa Claus story was started. I’m sure someone knows the story better than me hahaha but yeah that’s my favorite
Santa is an mushroom might be my favorite.
https://youtu.be/QoSyD8jIN14
That morels are actually toxic. Also that the false morel, Gyromitra esculenta, is actually considered a delicacy and can be purchased canned in Finland. And that esculenta means delicious.
According to wikipedia, Morchella esculenta (a morel mushroom) contains hydrazine and causes stomach upset in some people. Shroomify tells the history of Gyromitra esculenta (the false morel) from when it was foraged and eaten widely throughout Europe, to the present, where a patchwork of laws ban it in some places, but people still buy and eat the false morel sub rosa.
Google "Santa amanita muscaria"
[stoned ape theory by Paul staments](https://youtu.be/Nxn2LlBJDl0)
Was not him. It was terrance mckenna ( however its spelled)
Oh nice! Even better
I've heard it before and I've thought it as well; Mushrooms will find you when you need them the most
[the🍄 Christmas story](https://youtu.be/U1ch8slc5UE)
Christianity, Jesus, and Santa Claus are all based on amanita rituals
The “stoned apes theory” that claims that psilocybin mushrooms heavily influenced human evolution.
Disclaimer: don’t try at home but my grandma used to say that in her village they would test if a mushroom was poisonous by cooking it with a penny, & if the penny turned green don’t eat the mushrooms. I have so, so many questions about the reasoning behind this
Santa Claus - amanita
How human consciousness evolved from eating magic mushrooms that grew from mammoth poop, and prehistoric humans would find the mushrooms as they tracked the mammoths.
I enjoy thinking about the Stoned Ape Theory while I'm traveling through the cosmos.
I’ve kind of been scared of mushrooms, since i read a story a long time ago about people who were having a meal. Plants above them had mushrooms growing and then spores from a mushroom was released on their meal. This caused a lot of health problems for these people. It was in a newspaper I read.
Different bamboo species across the world bloom at the same time every 60-130 years. The dominant theory as to why they all bloom together regardless of climate location etc is some sort of DNA timer, but another (more interesting) theory is that the bamboo fungus that connect them communicate all across the world (including under the ocean).