Hacker News Reader

Comment by nelsondev | Hacker News Reader

Why do fungi generate electricity after deformation?

Or asked differently, what information is encoded in that electrical pulse? Presumably, evolutionarily, fungi developed transmitting information via mycelium to other connected fungi. But why are fungi letting connected fungi know, “hey, I got stepped on!” ?

View on HN

There need not be any evolutionary advantage to this particular property of mycelium, as long as its structure provides other evolutionary benefits. Such as a medium to transmit nutrients. In other words, it could be just a side-effect of something useful.

From reading the article, I get the sense that the piezoelectric effect in the wood itself is what is generating the electricity. So I think the role of the fungi is just to weaken the wood so that it's soft enough to compress more easily.

Would connecting several together then still produce more current? Because I'd assume that all the pieces of infected wood would have to be moving at the same time to generate friction.

> "Moreover, we were able to significantly increase the maximum output current (≈ 205 nA) by connecting 30 wood sponges in parallel to each other, making a demonstrator suitable for wooden tables or floors." which is at 0.69V

But what elements of cellulose and lignin would allow the flow of electrons ?

If someone steps on your foot, the nerves in your foot conduct an electrical signal to your brain for interpretation as pressure, pain, etc. Plants use external chemical signals for similar signaling. Presumably this is similar.

Right, but the point of the pain is to remind conscious me to pull my foot away. But fungi (afaik) aren’t conscious, nor can move, so what’s the evolutionary advantage to this signaling?

It may signal where to invest more effort into decomposing the material (if the pressure degrades the material) or where it wouldn't be a good idea to put effort into sprouting to reproduce (wouldn't make sense to put your reproductive organs in harm's way).

Alternatively, where it _would_ be a good idea to produce spores if you want to hitch a ride on some passing foot traffic.

We don't know. Interestingly enough, mushrooms also double their yield after a single high-voltage shock.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5029503/

I am kind of partial to the pan-psychic notion of all plants and animals who are living having something that could resemble consciousness or at least an experience of existing. It may not resemble the part of our consciousness that forms words and likes to project an ego into the world but perhaps the experiences we have while dreaming or non-verbally perceiving. I suspect that the experience of being a mycelium would be very alien to anything we can easily imagine. But this whole concept is best explored in science-fiction for now.

The idea that fungi would have rudimentary communication pathways isn't really that insane. That doesn't necessarily make it true, but it always strikes me as odd when people talk about plants, fungi and other non-animal life as if it wasn't life at all.

The Xenofungus from the video game Alpha Centauri comes to mind.

Depends on your definition of conscious, I suppose. Fungi can definitely move, just not via locomotion - fungi expand through mycelial networks and reproduction.

Who knows what the specific function is, maybe specific species are sensitive to the specific pressure of another species required for reproduction. In the plant example, they often use chemical signaling to repel predators (and note that plants are also "not conscious", and most are way less mobile than fungi).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com