The process happens so quickly - in 1/400th the time it takes for you to blink your eye - that nobody has been able to watch all the steps in the process or calculate the speed at which the spores fly. Scientists have been curious about fungal spore-flinging abilities for hundreds of years. The trouble is, not too many animals want to eat dung or the plants growing near it.ĭung-dwelling fungi have evolved a way to get around this challenge: They shoot their spores at high speed as far as two-and-a-half meters away, increasing the odds that a hungry herbivore will eat them. And to complete their life cycle, fungi release cells called spores that must be eaten by an animal so that a new generation can emerge. For starters, well, they’re living in dung. Life’s not easy for fungi that live on piles of animal waste, or dung. Filming a fungus at 250,000 frames per second, a research team could watch in slow-motion a process that usually takes a few millionths of a second: the fungus catapulting a spore as far out as possible.
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