Species perform life cycles by transmitting distinctive collections of genes from one generation to the next. Individuals contribute to this process if they serve as biological parents, but there is no cycle for each of them, each of us, just a beginning and an end. Cells behaving as amoebas are conductors for the whole journey, sculpting the developing fetus, protecting the body from bacterial and fungal infection, repairing wounds, and removing worn out cells. Amoebas also destroy cancer cells until they turn cancerous themselves, spread tumors across the body, and extinguish one on six of ..read more

If Kafka makes you laugh, this is for you: https://shepherd.com/bboy/2023/f/nicholas-p-money ..read more

As Homo sapiens races toward extinction, there is solace in recognizing that the rest of nature will fee relief in our departure. Adapted from The Selfish Ape , published in 2019: If extraterrestrials had trained their microphones on Earth they would have detected a rise in the exclamations of animal life in recent millennia, building to a crescendo of moans and grunts from animals subjected to ritualized torture in stadia, bull rings and bear pits, augmented by the modern vivisection of rodents, cats and primates—terrified animals restrained in the lab and probed with instruments that would ..read more

In a Goldilocks mushroom, the gills are not too close, not too far apart, but just the right distance for the spores to be shot to the open midplane. The following figure from a forthcoming review article shows the reciprocal changes in gill separation and discharge distance that might have played out during mushroom evolution. (Too esoteric for a blog post? Yes.) Caption: Hypothetical evolutionary seesaw that matches gill separation to the distance of ballistospore discharge. In this diagram, a modification to the range of the spore discharge mechanism precedes an increase in gill spacing ..read more

Humans are on the fast track to extinction and the mess that we have made will take most of the larger animals with us. In our unenviable position as witnesses of the collapse of the biosphere, grace can be sought in the certainty of the peaceful afterlife of the planet. The death of the last human will mean the end of human anguish. Picking gorillas as an example of the nonhuman casualties, the death of the last one is also hopeful, because after two centuries of gorilla hunting and trapping, there will be no more of these beautiful creatures to be shot. Pick any species of animal and its ..read more

Why are the color patterns of the fly agaric mushroom and the netted rhodotus mushroom similar, and why do both resemble the corpse flower? Does the interruption of the background color of these organisms stimulate the compound vision of flies? Is there any similarity between the patterning of these species and the mottled appearance of animal cadavers? Are some natural instances of white detailing on red backgrounds examples of Batesian or Müllerian mimicry? What is the meaning of this distinctive form of coloration among fungi and plants ..read more

& a second recent musical homage ..read more

The answer, fellow mycologists, is blowing in the wind. Stalked mushrooms with gills beneath their umbrellas evolved in the Jurassic. This is the rough timing that we infer from the DNA clocks in fungi that appear to have been ticking for more than 150 million years. Jurassic forests were filled with prehistoric Chilean pines, or monkey puzzle trees, cycads, and other cone-bearing conifers. The first birds launched themselves from branches, small mammals crunched on insects, and ferns grew under the open tree canopy where the sunlight warmed the forest floor. Mushroom colonies spread in the ..read more

From the depths of this Ohio winter, I am pondering whether we are on the cusp of Civil War II in my beloved adopted country and The Eschaton in Ukraine. In a failed attempt to take my mind elsewhere I am reading poems by British poet and painter, David Jones (1895-1974). Jones served in the Royal Welch Fusiliers in the First World War. His best-known poem is an epic, Anathemata, published in 1952, which defies synopsis. Returning to my current concerns, I adapt the following lines from his shorter verse, Protothalamion . Song for America, 2022     I have heard bird-song seen flo ..read more

It is so rare to take pause and breathe slowly enough to contemplate the experience of being alive. This is a terrible shame, given the sheer improbability of existence when measured against the infinite length of one’s dark bloodless future. Most moments of any lifetime are added to our libraries of blurred remembrances as soon as they are done, but there are a few that persist as if they never stopped happening. There was an evening from my childhood, for example, when I stood alone, confused but excited by the sight of boxing hares in a Chiltern meadow. They ran wildly, stopping every so of ..read more