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Researchers share lessons from humongous fungus

COLUMBIA, Mo. — It was discovered nearly three decades ago. At the time, it was thought to be heavier than a blue whale, bigger than 23 football fields and more than 1,500 years old. The news of its discovery appeared in almost all the major media outlets and even made David Letterman’s Top 10 list.

In July 2018, in a preprint paper posted on bioRxiv, scientists studying it announced that the so-called “humongous fungus,” an individual of Armillaria gallica that lives in a forest in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, is actually four times bigger and around one and a half times older than previously thought.

It’s not just that it’s so big and old. It’s also about what “H.F.”, as retired University of Missouri professor Johann Bruhn refers to it, can teach us. Bruhn has studied the Armillaria species for around 40 years as a research associate professor at Michigan Technological University first, and then at MU.

In the autumn, if it’s not too dry, mushrooms pop up near a tree or grow from the stem. A person looking at one may think that there is nothing more to it. But that’s not the case. A mushroom is just a piece of the puzzle — the “tip of the iceberg,” so to speak, of a fungus.

The main “body” of most fungi — the part we don’t usually see — is called the mycelium. One example is a fibrous or cottony growth that appears on fruit as it rots. Mycelium is composed of microscopic filaments called hyphae that look like tiny threads woven together, and in forests it mostly stays underground or within decaying wood.

So it lives unseen, until the time when it has enough nutrients and the weather is right for development of fruiting structures: mushrooms. As the mycelium exhausts nutrients from one food source, it grows outward seeking new ones. It usually expands as a ring that is known as a fairy circle. That’s how separate mushrooms a couple of feet away may actually belong to the same fungus.

Fungi belonging to genus Armillaria act primarily as decomposers of roots of trees that are already under stress, as well as their stumps and fallen stems.

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