Although fungi may seem like independent and silent organisms to us, recent research shows much more interaction than we imagined. Fungi can talk to each other and recognize up to 50 words , suggests a new study published in the journal Royal Society Open Science.
The British computer scientist Andrew Adamatzky, director of the Non-Conventional Computing Laboratory at the University of the West of England in Bristol (United Kingdom), has studied the electrical activity of four species of fungi (such as golden needle mushrooms or ghost mushrooms), inserting tiny microelectrodes on substrates colonized by their mosaic of hyphal threads, their mycelium, discovering that the electrical impulses were structurally similar to human speech and resembled a vocabulary of dozens of words.
Fungi speak their own language
The research team found that the impulses increased when the fungi (which digest wood) came into contact with this material, suggesting that they are capable of using electrical transmissions to share information with their conspecifics about food, potential sources of danger and damage or other nearby resources. The impulses varied in amplitude, frequency and duration.
When signal activity increases, they create intricate patterns that can function like words in human speech. It is estimated that the fungal vocabulary could consist of about 50 “fungal words”.
Professor Adamatzky stated that the average length of each ‘word’ was 5.97 letters (Spanish has an average of 4.9 letters per word, as an example) and that he showed that fungi had a ‘mind and consciousness’.
“We don’t know if there is a direct relationship between spike patterns in fungi and human speech. Possibly not,” Adamatzky said. “On the other hand, there are many similarities in information processing in living substrates of different classes, families, and species. I was just curious to compare.”
Deciphering the fungal language
Thus, despite lacking a nervous system, fungi seem to transmit information using electrical impulses through thread-like filaments called hyphae. The filaments form a thin network called mycelium that binds fungal colonies within the soil. These networks are remarkably similar to animal nervous systems.
By measuring the frequency and intensity of the impulses, it is possible to decipher and understand the languages used to communicate within and between organisms across the realms of life.
Is it an overzealous view of fungal communication? Some scientists have already argued that this is a somewhat risky claim and that much more research is needed to interpret this conclusion about the world of fungi. Of course, there remains the possibility that electrical signals do not represent communication at all; rather, the charged hyphal tips passing the electrode could have generated the spikes in activity seen in the study and not lead to words or speech-like fungal transmission of any kind.
What we can extract from the research is that electrical spikes are potentially a new mechanism to transmit information through the fungal mycelium.
Referencia: Andrew Adamatzky. 2022. Language of fungi derived from their electrical spiking activity. Royal Society Open Science 9 (4): 211926; doi: 10.1098/rsos.211926
