/jp/ - Otaku Culture

>>22360561
Oh boy, mushrooms are weird. I still have a fact file from Kinokore days, and I'll never forgive that game for dying on me after teasing ant and cicada fungi, but they go weirder than that.

For starters, a lot of fungi grow a kind of hoop, and if a nematode passes through it, the hoop constricts and strangles it, and the fungus feeds on the corpse. There's another, completely unrelated water mold called Haploglossa, and it also hunts nematodes, except instead of a hoop it's got a kind of hydraulic piston connected to a harpoon, and if anything touches this "gun cell", the harpoon shoots up and injects the fungus into the worm. There's Massospora, a fungus that forces male cicadas to act like females (which have a wing-flick response to show they're receptive to mating) so that they can seduce other males and spread the fungus to them (they will also mate with females, and healthy cicadas don't seem to care about infection status, because there have been cases where a male tries to pull out and his partner's abdomen crumbles into fungi). There are rust fungi that infect plants in the mustard family and force them to grow fake flowers that contain spores instead of pollen, and even have a floral odor to attract pollinators. The mummy berry fungus does the same with blueberries, but its spores are also the same shape as blueberry pollen, so the plant willingly lets it into its ovaries. The termite ball fungus goes one step further and tricks insects, mimicking termite eggs to gain access to their nurseries, while Smittium fungi can directly hijack the ovaries of blackflies and force them to lay fungal masses instead of eggs.

There's also the famous Cordyceps and friends, plus the unrelated but similar Septobasidium, which kind of acts like Zerg creep: It's a tree fungus that can't actually grow into trees, so it takes over scale insects that feed on the tree instead. Scales in its colony are infested with fungal tendrils, but they're also alive and protected from parasites under a mat of fungus, and they can even mate and reproduce in that condition. The catch is that every hatchling is seeded with spores, and will spread the fungal mat wherever they crawl, like a big colonial Parasect... and it's apparently still a mutualism, because the scales do even worse without their parasitic Big Sister to look over their shoulders. On a friendlier front, the social spider Mallos gregalis cultivates yeasts in the remains of their prey (other spiders remove carcasses from their webs, and for reasons unknown, spider-tended carcasses are better at supporting yeast growth), and the smell of decay attracts carrion-feeding flies into their communal web.

None of these have flower meanings, though, so they aren't coming into FKG anytime soon.