DID YOU KNOW MUSHROOMS HAVE THEIR OWN 50 WORD LANGUAGE

Communication is universal in the animal kingdom, however have you ever wondered whether plants and fungi also have a way of communicating. To blow your mind, it turns out that they may communicate in “language”. 

An interesting paper published in Royal Society Open Science suggested changes in fungi electrical potential indicate language. Surprisingly, each species seems to have their own lexicon.

Fungi has mycelium networks, which is a web of underground fungal material tying together trees and mushrooms in healthy forests. It is believed that these networks play a role in communication between organisms.

The author of the paper published, Professor Andrew Adamatzky, studied the electric pulses across mushroom species. In his study, he made the discovery that these pulse change with stimuli such as light, touch, and chemical shifts. The oyster fungi, for example, has only two spikes, with a time of 2.6 minutes and 14 minutes long. 

Discovering this, Adamatzky then turned his attention to a select four species of mushroom. He amazingly came to identify what seemed like a unique variety of words being spoken with the use of intervals between spikes and high and low frequency pulses. 

Adamatzky found that the lexicons reached 50 words. However, only 15 to 20 words were used frequently. In addition, the Cordyceps militaris fungi specie recorded an average of 8.9 spikes in a word, while the Omphalotus nidiformis has just 3.3. 

Even though these words are not yet translated, it can be that they are signalling rich soil or a threat approaching. The possibility of a mushroom language is new and exciting, some scientists express reservations that the signals replicate a translatable language as we know it.