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Comment by Legend2440 | Hacker News Reader

I’m skeptical that the mushroom is in any way “learning to crawl”. It looks more like the mushroom naturally produces signals in response to light, and the robot triggers a walk cycle when it sees that signal.

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As a fungophile who spends way too much time crawling around in the woods looking for mushrooms, I think fungus learned to crawl before we did.

I find that claim interesting, especially given your background in studying fungus. Could you expand on it a bit?

Slime molds are super interesting and are able to find optimal paths for resource management. Slime molds have been used to model and improve traffic flow for humans.

https://phys.org/news/2022-01-virtual-slime-mold-subway-netw...

I would call this action "crawling" and I am sure predates mammals. Or dinosaurs. Or plants.

Slime molds aren’t fungus, though…

> Slime molds are classified within the Kingdom Protista, and are more closely related to amoebas and certain seaweeds than to fungi, plants, or animals.

Not a true fungi; today I learned. Thanks!

If you take a small plot of wild land, say 50'x50' and visit it everyday watching all the various mushrooms which will grow there (there will be far more then most people realize or expect) and try and find the sense in where and when they fruit it becomes difficult to write it all off as simple biological responses to environment/following the food/etc, and even if you do look at it that way and start adding up the possible causes and effects you can end up with such a long list that it becomes difficult to not see it as some sort of at least instinctual level intelligence and that the growth of mycelium often has more in common with crawling than mindless growth.

For example, many mushrooms are very good at fruiting just out of sight from trails, walk 20' off the trail, turn around and suddenly you start seeing mushrooms. Instinct is to say that all the mushrooms which grow within sight of the trail get picked by curious people or kicked by children but if you start looking for remains and stumps and mushrumps and those hard to spot just starting to fruit immature buttons, you find surprisingly few. So you think environmental, the trail alters windflow and runoff, animal movement, etc, but than you notice that this is true of even those small trails created by a fox or children which only affect a bit of low growing undergrowth so only has a tiny effect on a very localized area. On and on it goes until you run out of explanations.

I am mostly convinced there is some level of intelligence here and we just can not see it because it is so very different from what we understand as intelligence. But, I may just spend too much time with mushrooms, during the season I always seem to have at least a dozen various mushrooms which I will visit everyday to watch them grow and rot away.

great read: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187861462...

fungi has memory and can decide to not grow on a previous hostile enviroment/direction

edit: i'm skeptical about the fantastic type of journalism title. the paper points on using fungi electrical reactions to light to drive a robot, not the the otherwise, even less the fungi understanding a "robot" and using it. despite them showing spatial perception on studies about their capabilities

What the article says is that fungi produces electrical spikes and those spikes may encode information and function like a primitive language to coordinate activity across the network.

But what if the environment was never hostile and they still avoid it? Some research hints that fungi can react to vibration, like stimuli, but there's no solid proof that mushrooms avoid trails because of it. Still, it feels worth investigating.

Looks like they respond to their environment in complex ways. What if mushrooms avoid trails because they feel the vibrations? Maybe they learned that foot traffic = danger. So it grows out of reach.

You should explore this theory and run some field studies.

Avoiding the trails can generally explained in fairly simple ways; trail lets in more sunlight so ground near the trail is drier, soil of trails are often heavily compacted which means very dry and hard with very wet and soft on either side from rain water run off, trails funnel air flow down them which affects the moisture levels in the air and soil, etc. The thing here is their knack for growing out of sight of the trail, which is not just a distance thing, many mushrooms are far from inconspicuous and can be seen from a good distance but seem to be able to find those places where they won't be noticed even when growing near a trail.

So you look at a particular mushroom's requirements for fruiting and look to see how those are met by the place they are growing and try and try to figure out why they fruited in just that spot but not 5 feet over offers the exact same conditions other than that spot 5 feet over being more visible from the trail. On the larger well traveled trails it is fairly easy to find possible explanations, that spot which is not visible from the trail is often the spot protected from how the trail affects airflow/sunlight but things get less clear on the small less traveled trails which have a minimal affect on the local environment.

You can generally explain away everything with simple biological responses but often it requires quite a few and their all being informed by the others, not just acting in isolation, and at that point it starts looking like some level of intelligence. I am always amazed by the number and variety of mushrooms you find once you leave the trail and you don't even have to go far, 5 or 10 feet is often all it takes.

Unlikely I will ever do any sort of field study, I am perfectly content with just watching them grow and not having all the answers.

I like that you saw this with your own eyes and noticed things that are hard to explain rather than just reading about it and settling for someone else's hypothesis. Thanks for sharing!

Off topic but my dad took me around the woods this weekend to show me mushrooms and he almost couldn’t contain his excitement. And this is a person who usually doesn’t like stuff. And the whole time I was like “yep, that’s a mushroom”. There’s clearly something fascinating about the hobby that I don’t get (yet). Curious to hear your take.

Your dad sounds like a good sort. I have no idea how to explain the mushroom fascination that some of us have to those that lack it and have mostly learned to just not talk about mushrooms with people who don't have the fascination.

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