Have mushrooms been chatting with each other this whole time? Maybe so. An analysis of the electrical spike-based “language” fungi use to communicate, reported today (April 6) in Royal Society Open Science, finds that the patterns in these spikes are strikingly similar to human speech.
Fungi send electrical signals to one another through hyphae—long, filamentous tendrils that the organisms use to grow and explore. The Guardian reports that previous research shows that the number of electrical impulses traveling through hyphae, sometimes likened to neurons, increases when fungi encounter new sources of food, and that this suggests it’s possible that fungi use this “language” to let each other know about new food sources or injury.
In the new study, Adam Adamatsky, a computer scientist at the Unconventional Computing Laboratory at the University of West of England, focused on four species of mushrooms: enoki, split gill, ghost, and caterpillar fungi. He inserted ...
