Mushrooms communicate with each other using up to 50 'words', scientist claims (2022)
59 comments
·June 9, 2025floatrock
Anon84
In their defense, this is from 2022 before tokens were popularized
woopsn
The generic unit of information is still the "bit", and the word "word" -- which is not a unit of information, depending on entropy of the encoding -- is still standard terminology in communication theory.
null
mattslip
Nice one
noiv
The thought that organisms sharing environments could avoid communication appears absurd to me.
Metabolic byproducts, chemical gradients, and behavioral patterns automatically transmit information. Physical proximity creates mandatory information channels.
Environmental sharing makes communication inevitable, not optional.
rybosome
This is a great point - communication is a vast array of information channels. “Motion” is communication whether or not it evolved to be, and so is every other aspect of occupying space in a biome.
And given that the organism under scrutiny is fungi - which contains many sprouting heads of the same underlying organism - one would have to have to have no familiarity with life at all to be surprised by intra-organism communication.
woopsn
Would an alien encountering human language say "whatever it is not fundamentally different from the fact they shed skin cells in each other's space"?
> The research, published in Royal Society Open Science, found that these spikes often clustered into trains of activity, resembling vocabularies of up to 50 words, and that the distribution of these “fungal word lengths” closely matched those of human languages.
I'll be the one to admit I am surprised by this (if true), even with the understanding that any motion or byproduct whatsoever might be communicative.
The thought that an organism is totally isolated from its environment, itself and other organisms is absurd, sure - but no one said that!
SoftTalker
"Though interesting, the interpretation as language seems somewhat overenthusiastic"
Classic British understatement.
OJFord
Article from 2022 (not in the title at present - Anon84 if you can still edit, it's usual (and possibly in guidelines) to add '(2022)' at the end).
Xmd5a
https://phys.org/news/2014-08-physicists-eye-neural-formula-...
>Their findings, verified with neural data of blowflies reacting to changes in visual signals, may have universal applications. "It's a simple mechanism," Nemenman says. "If a system has some hidden variable, and many units, such as 40 or 50 neurons, are adapted and responding to the variable, then Zipf's law will kick in."
geodel
So they are really Large Language Mushrooms.
rybosome
I wish that I had the deep biology knowledge to make a joke (not joke?) Large Mushroom Model based on actual signal data.
This also makes me wonder about the idea of attempting to expand on this research by artificially stimulating a fungal colony with the various “words” and seeing if different effects can be produced.
culi
Fun fact, "wood wide web" is a term used to describe the underground fungal network plants use to talk to each other. It's science communication but it's a term I've seen frequently used in published papers
ChuckMcM
Okay, while it's really interesting that there are these detectable electrical "signals" this headline really needs "scientist who eats a mushroom discovers that mushrooms can talk." kind of vibe. (the champignon pun in the article not withstanding).
That said, given that multicellular life is just a mashup of single cell life with various bits kept because they were useful, it might be useful to investigate if these fungal structures were adapted as neurons.
IAmBroom
Fungal cells are not ancestors of Animalia.
overu589
Found googling “do mushrooms and humans share DNA” (ignoring LLM affirmations.)
> Mushrooms are more closely related to animals than plants, said Matt Kasson, an associate professor of mycology at West Virginia University.
Apparently we share about 50% of our DNA.
adrian_b
Fungi and animals have a common ancestor, but that ancestor was an unicellular protozoan, without any resemblance to a fungus, but which resembled somewhat a human sperm cell, by having a single posterior flagellum used for swimming. Fungi and animals and their close unicellular relatives are called opisthokonts (Opisthokonta), which is a name describing their posterior flagellum (opistho- means back, while konta was the name for the rods that were used for pushing boats in areas with shallow water).
The branch that has evolved towards animals has developed multi-cellularity while retaining their ancestral lifestyle of eating other living beings, which is a lifestyle that requires mobility.
The branch that has evolved towards fungi has adapted to a terrestrial life, unlike the branch that has evolved towards animals in the oceans.
To avoid desiccation on land, the fungi have developed a chitinous cell wall. This has solved the desiccation problem, but this wall has made the fungal cells immobile. So they had to change their lifestyle from the ancestral lifestyle of the eukaryotes to a lifestyle similar to that of the heterotrophic bacteria, i.e. fungi do not eat food by engulfing it, like animals, but they grow into food, by secreting enzymes that break the food into small molecules, which can be then absorbed by the fungal cells.
While there exists only a single group of living beings like the animals, which are both multicellular and mobile, there are several groups like the fungi, besides the true fungi. All such fungous organisms have immobile cells with cell walls, so if they are multicellular they must grow into food in the form of a branched network, in order to maximize the surface of contact between them and food.
The other groups of living beings that look like fungi, but which are not true fungi, are not closely related to animals. The most important of those groups is related to the brown algae, but there is even a group of bacteria that look like fungi, the actinomycetes. Besides the other living beings that feed like fungi, so they look like mycelia (branched networks), there are even more groups of living beings that do not feed like fungi, so most of the time they do not look like fungi, but which are terrestrial like fungi, so they must use the same method of spore dispersion by wind, so they grow mushroom-like bodies for the launch of spores, e.g. the slime molds.
Aloisius
> Apparently we share about 50% of our DNA.
This feels like the "we share 50% of our genes with bananas" factoid.
Considering humans have 3.1 billion base pairs and the most fungi have 30-300 million, I'm not sure how this could be true without some major caveats. Admittedly, a lot of our DNA is considered "junk" - though whether it all is or not is a question.
(the banana one is that they're talking specifically about protein coding genes which makes up about 2% of our DNA)
OJFord
That's not inconsistent with GP's comment - animalia and fungi are opisthokonts, but siblings or cousins in a family tree sense, neither is ancestor to the other, but there is common ancestry.
eggy
Article is three years old, and the fungi are not talking to us! I imagine the communication being a bit slow like the scene in the kids animated movie, Zootopia, where sloths work at the DMV..."P....L....E....A....S....E-------" don't tread on me! However, if like German 1 word can cover a whole concept, then 50 words may be sufficient to communicate in a reasonable time scale ;)
0_____0
"eierlegende wollmilchsau"
seeknotfind
I wonder what other predictions from 2009 James Cameron's Avatar will come true.
ZhadruOmjar
As a total amateur in the world of fungus I really enjoyed reading Entangled Life.
This scientist is behind the times... new term for 'generic unit of information in abstract communication networks' is "token"