User:Pinteritte

i'm Pinteritte. i keep coming back to Wikipedia to fix one small thing, and then the small thing has relatives. at this point "i don't edit anymore" should probably be treated as a temporary condition.

these days i mostly end up here after noticing an outdated number or a sentence that explains something backwards. then i see another thing while checking it, and suddenly the one small edit has relatives. my edits are over here. complaints, mushroom facts, etc. can go on my talk page.

in real life i major biology, chemistry and maths. i like plants, fungi, cells, and most things that make you open five tabs before the first paragraph is over. (plants and fungi. different kingdoms. i know.)

ushrooms get all the attention because they are the bit we can see. calling the mushroom "the fungus" is normal and i do it too, but if we are being annoying about it (we are), it is a bit like pointing at an apple and calling it the whole tree.

for a mushroom-forming fungus, most of the organism is usually mycelium. mycelium is made from microscopic threads called hyphae (one thread is a hypha), which grow through whatever the fungus is living in. the mushroom is a temporary structure made by that network to produce and release spores.

this also means that the word mycelium names the actual fungal body, while the nice red thing everybody recognises gets to represent the whole organism. the mushroom article and the mycelium article are about different things, which is correct and also slightly funny.

fungi are not plants either. they do not photosynthesise, their cell walls contain chitin instead of the cellulose found in plant cell walls, and they are more closely related to animals than to plants. this makes the "plant" shelf in bookshops look less wrong than it should. not correct. just less wrong.

the simple answer is eating. the less simple answer is that fungi eat in almost the opposite order to us.

an animal generally puts food inside itself and then digests it. a fungus releases digestive enzymes into the material around it first, breaks large molecules into smaller ones there, and then absorbs the result through its hyphae. some of those molecules are used near the growing tip and some are moved elsewhere through the mycelium.

being made from lots of very thin, branching threads gives mycelium a huge surface area in contact with its surroundings. hyphae grow mainly at their tips. they branch, change direction and can sometimes fuse back together. this makes a network that can keep growing through soil or wood without the entire thing having to move. they are not roots. i keep wanting to call them roots because it is convenient and then correcting myself two words later.

many hyphae are divided by cross-walls called septa. the septa often have pores, so material can still move between compartments. other fungi have hyphae with few or no regular septa and many nuclei sharing the same stretch of cytoplasm. the details depend on the fungus and this is where the diagrams in my notes stop looking helpful.

different fungi are equipped to break down different things. some are good at sugars and starches, some can attack cellulose, and some can deal with much more stubborn material. wood contains cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin, and different groups of fungi leave different bits behind. white rot and brown rot do not even produce the same-looking mess.

fungi also do rather more than rot logs. many live around or inside plant roots in relationships called mycorrhizae. the plant supplies carbon compounds made through photosynthesis; the fungus can help the plant obtain water and mineral nutrients from a much larger volume of soil. how useful this is to either side depends on the species and the conditions around them.

in arbuscular mycorrhizae, fungal hyphae enter the root and make tiny branching structures called arbuscules inside root cells. in ectomycorrhizae, the fungus stays outside the cells, wrapping the root and growing between them instead. both arrangements create a large contact surface where materials can be exchanged.

i had a diagram for this once. it started as one root and a few arrows, then i added the cortex, arbuscules, phosphorus going one way, carbon the other way, and two labels that covered each other. it is probably still in a folder named final somewhere.

other fungi are parasites, pathogens, endophytes living quietly inside plants, or lichens working together with photosynthetic partners. some are single-celled yeasts and do not spend their lives making a giant underground network at all.

fungi also recycle nutrients that would otherwise remain locked in dead organisms. carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus return to soil and food webs while dead material is broken down. bacteria and a lot of less-famous organisms are doing this too. i started this section with mycelium and have somehow ended up at the whole nutrient cycle. anyway.

the recognisable mushroom appears when a suitable fungus decides that conditions are right for reproduction. hyphae organise into a fruiting body, spores develop, and the finished structure gets them away from the parent mycelium. gills, pores, teeth, folds, puffballs, cups, and other shapes are different solutions to the same general problem: make spores and put them somewhere useful.

even releasing a spore can be complicated. in many gilled mushrooms, a microscopic droplet of water forms near the base of the spore. when it suddenly joins with another film of water on the spore, the change in surface tension launches the spore away from the gill. this is called Buller's drop. the launch takes a fraction of a millisecond.

wind can carry spores further. animals move them. rain splashes them. some fungi forcibly shoot spores from microscopic sacs.

puffballs are fun.

this table proves nothing, but i wanted the links.

the mycorrhiza section is the part i keep returning to. it is easy to draw a root and a fungus and an arrow labelled "carbon", and much harder to say how much either partner gets out of the deal in a given soil. the honest answer is that it depends on the species, the plant, the nutrients available, and what else is in the soil.

lichens are a separate small obsession. a lichen is not one organism. it is a fungus living with a photosynthetic partner, usually an alga or a cyanobacterium, and sometimes with more than one. the fungus provides structure and the partner provides sugars. the whole thing can survive places that neither would manage alone, which is a neat trick and also makes lichens terrible to identify.

yeasts are the other end of the scale. single cells, no mushroom, no giant network, just a lot of dividing. they are still fungi. "fungus" does not mean "mushroom" any more than "animal" means "deer".

edible mushrooms are a good way to get into trouble. the field guides are full of species that are safe, species that are not, and species that are only safe if you cook them in a particular way, and several of those look like each other. the useful habit is to identify with more than one feature and more than one source, and to be less confident than the person on the internet who says it is definitely fine.

i have a folder of photographs of things i could not identify. it is large.

i would love to claim i have a grand editing project. usually i press random page, think "that sounds odd", check it, and then it is much later than it was before.

the edits i like most are boring once they are finished. a value matches again. the update history says when it changed. a sentence can be read once instead of four times. a missing link exists. nobody notices that any of this happened, which is normally a sign that it worked.

there is something satisfying about following a tiny inconsistency until it makes sense. sometimes the page is wrong. sometimes another page is wrong. sometimes the sources disagree and both pages are describing different years. once i spent forty minutes checking a sentence and found out it was already fine. i changed nothing.

i don't edit because i still know everything. i edit because i like finding out how a thing works and leaving the explanation a little easier for the next person to find.

if you found something odd, tell me on my talk page. if you are trying to work out why i changed something, my contributions may or may not help.

now go open a random page. there is probably a citation from three years ago waiting for somebody.

..probably editing this page again later....