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Largest Living Organism Is A Fungus
Makarand writes "A single enormous underground fungus found growing in a Canadian
forest and estimated to between 2000 and 8500 years old
could easily be
the largest known living organism on earth.
This fungus is believed to have begun its life
as a microscopic spore and then grown to cover
an area of around an area of 9.65 square kilometers.
That it is a single organism was confirmed by
collecting samples of the fungus from different
parts of the forest and observing their
reactions as they were grown together on
Petri dishes. Fungal growths have the
ability to distinguish their own growths
from other fungal individuals."
That the guiness book of world records is sponsoring an event to use it to attempt create the worlds largest pizza.
The article does give some very interesting statistics, but I'd be interested to know if any Astronomers can estimate how many Volkswagen Bugs this fungus might occupy...
Reminds me of those "IT came from below" old movies.
"I heard you're a fun guy!'
Except of course the fact their method of verification worked at all invalidated it. After all, two separate, unattached pieces of tissue, even if taken the same creature, can hardly be considered to be the same organism. They may be genetically identical copies of each other, but they have the opportunity to develop separately. What verification is their that the giant fungus is not really a couple of dozen, slowly having developed and broken off from the original growth?
I've had this sig for three days.
I dig those 'blob' movies...
"It's overkill, of course. But you can never have too much overkill." - Anonymous Slashdot Coward
to be posting stories about CowboyNeal? ;>
Mulder and Scully got pulled into this giant mushroom that got them stoned so it would have time to digest them with uhhh.. hydrochloric acid or something. Then the skin man found them. It was awesome... imagine a shroom that big.
Well of course Windows XP is a fungus, what did you *think* it was? ;)
But anyway, here's another story, seemingly on the same growth:
Armillaria in Oregon
Here's some information about this type of fungus:
Armillaria tree growth
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
Life really is imitating art. Didn't this thing drug and kidnap Mulder and Scully in an episode?
Jason
"FORMAT C:" - Kills bugs dead!
us Americans are going to take over the world :)
Stupid things kids do.
"Look Mario! I think the fungus is trying to help us!"
*slight crashing sound*
...It's an alien shroom trying to get us all high so it's masters can take over the world? Or perhaps it was created by the Brain (if you don't get the refrence, just laugh)?
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these!
Seriously though, I know it sounds a little crazy but I wonded if this thing has any sort of rudimentary intelligence. I mean if it is 8500 years old it seems like it would have time to figure something out. I suppose it would need nerves though....
If you want to see the world's oldest fungus, check in that odd foil-wrapped package in the back of my refrigerator, and if it's not there, I'll lend you my old sneakers!
It was my understanding that the largest living organism may be an Aspen forest. Aspens reproduce through runners, so it is possible that an entire aspen forest can actually be one organism. I'm sure you can find aspen forests larger than 10 square kilometers, but of course there could be many different plants there. I wouldn't be surprised, however, if it were the oldest.
That's one hell of a mushroom. Wonder if it's edible.
This sig no verb.
about the size of 6000 hockey rinks....
nice!
Enjoy your job, make lots of money, work within the law. Choose any two.
From the article:
The clone of Armillaria ostoyae--the tree-killing fungus that causes Armillaria root disease--covers an area of 9.65 square kilometres, about the size of 6000 hockey rinks or 1600 football fields.
Talk about frustrating. Hockey rinks? Football fields? I thought the standard unit of area was olympic-sized swimming pools now. Can journalists just not keep up?
--Dan
...I got nothing.
Only in slashdot are posts of solidarity modded at -1 Redundant, while posts of antagonism are modded as -1 Flamebait.
I once datedd a fungal individual. Hey, could it be...?!
PegQuin--I've got a sneakin' suspicion
Quick! Someone call Steve McQueen!
"estimated to between 2000 and 8500 years old"
That is quite old. Without bothering to research, I'd reckon that there aren't many living organisms older than that either.
it could be just me, but the way I read the article was that the fungus was discovered in an OREGON forest, and the data was collected by the USDA. Does anyone want to tell me where there's an Oregon in Canada?
Of course, the poster might not have read the article carefully and just sourced it as Ottawa, Ontario, taken from the first line.
In my humble opinion, it is the DNA that consitutes a single organism. Each cell should have basically the same genetic structure, if they don't, they aren't the same organism.
-Sean
At the time of the original large fungus discoveries, I recall that the largest living organism was considered to be a tree. Actually, grove of aspen trees that all shared the same roots.
When the aspen trees were discovered, they replaced some giant sequoia which had long been considered both the largest and fastest growing organism on earth.
This article shed some light on a different subject as well.
The typical American unit of area, the football field converts to the Canadian (metric?) unit of area, the hockey rink with a ratio of 6000hr/1600ff or 3.75 to 1
Very helpful information.
this fungus produces mashrooms with spores from which a clone of the original mashroom would grow.
This Petri Dish test proves nothing.
If you take a grapevine cuts and make a vineard on the opposite side of the valley - does it than follow that the Gallo vineries is the biggest living single organism in Napa?
I doubt that we will ever figure out - and I suspect that even if we did figure out we couldn't do much about it
Does this mean the fungus will be put on the endangered species list?
yeah, yeah, it's the largest fungus in the world, but does it smell worse than the fungus growing under my arms?
this is not a sig.
There's a fungus among us, and it's humungous.
Too many legs.
Keep your packets off my GNU/Girlfriend!
Olympic sized swimming pool is a mesure of volume, as in "could fill an olympic sized swimming pool...". In this case both the American (football fields) and Canadian (hockey rinks) units for area were used.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
it was sort of the same thing. Intresting that he sort of "foresaw" something like that.
What type of football field? Soccer, American, Australian Rules, etc.
Also, hockey rinks vary among and within different leagues but fit within several parameters, when you multiply the difference by 6000, you can have a huge difference in sizes. To which size rink are they referring?
Their scientific measurements remind me of the Nasa Mars Lander errors.
The Upper Penninsula of Michigan also has a giant underground fungus. I wonder if this one tops it. Seriously, they sell t-shirts and other junk sporting "There's a humungous fungus among us".
There are bacteria living in the tiny cracks of rock strata kilometres below the earth that are much older.
..."
old stuff
"... Melanie R. Mormile of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash., who herself described 97,000-year-old salt-derived microbes at the ASM meeting,
... that knows how to assimilate software.
"the largest known living organism on earth"
Are there larger living things somewhere else?
The current record holder is a creosote bush in the Mojave Desert at nearly 11,700 years old. Well, technically the creosote bush only lives ~100 years but the current bushes are clones growing in a huge ring that are descended from the original plant, as the article says.