Last week Asa was licking toads, and now this week he claims that mushrooms can talk! Even more surprising is that he has scientific research to back up this claim! According to Andrew Adamatzky, a computer scientist at the University of the West England, “some fungi use electrical impulses to share and process information internally. When signal activity spikes, it creates intricate patterns that may function like words in human speech.” In fact he goes on to claim their vocabulary could consist of approximately 50 words!
According to “Language of Fungi Derived from Their Electrical Spiking Activity,” published in the Royal Society Open Science (April 2022), Adamatzky examined four fungi species—ghost fungi, caterpillar fungi, split gill fungi, and enoki fungi. He found that spikes were organized into groups, that varied in length, which resembled a human vocabulary. Adamatzky did caution though that, “We do not know if there is a direct relationship between spiking patterns in fungi and human speech.” However, he did say “there are many similarities in information processing in living substrates of different classes, families, and species. I was just curious to compare.”
Curiously, although it appears they have a vocabulary of approximately 50 words, fungi only use about 15 to 20 words on a regular basis, with the split gill mushrooms producing the most complex “sentences.” Well I guess I can somewhat understand the split gill fungi being more chatty than the caterpillar mushroom, because I’ve yet to hear Asa’s caterpillar squeaky toy say much in recent years. And when it comes to dogs, although we understand a lot of words, we also rely on just a few key words on a regular basis, including feed me, breakfast, dinner, and fetch.
What is more shocking though is Adamatzky suggested that, “the most likely reasons for these waves of electrical activity are to maintain the fungi’s integrity – analogous to wolves howling to maintain the integrity of the pack – or to report newly discovered sources of attractants and repellants to other parts of their mycelia.” WHAT? How could a mushroom and a wolf possibly have anything in common?
Adamatzky, Asa and I can at least agree on one thing, that more research needs to be done. In an interview with The Guardian, Dan Bebber, an associate professor of biosciences at the University of Exeter, and a member of the British Mycological Society’s fungal biology research committee, who was not involved in this study, said signals could be similar to nutrient pulses seen in other fungi. Bebber concluded, “though interesting, the interpretation as language seems somewhat overenthusiastic, and would require far more research and testing of critical hypotheses before we see ‘Fungus’ on Google Translate.” I agree, Barking needs to be translated well before Fungus! Dogs have way more social media accounts than mushrooms.
Regardless of where we stand on this issue, there is one good thing to come out of it. Asa now has someone he can tell his jokes to that may listen. I just hope that mushroom doesn’t repeat his bad puns to the other mushrooms!
