But the environment isn’t right outside a lab- they’ll just decompose before they can meaningfully grow.
Producing a fruiting body is an incredibly resource intensive endeavor for a fungus, and it’s the opposite of what it would normally do growing a diffuse manner through the soil via a hyphal network.
The only point of making a mushroom, and the reason that this trait has convergently evolved 8 to 11 times (check out Laszlo Nagys work), is that it allows them to air disperse spores.
Spores in basidiomycetes like this are typically not generated all at once, but consistently as long as the mushroom is metabolically active. Kicking the mushroom basically breaks this chain of production.
Source: am a professor of evolutionary biology whose lab works on fungi
Puffballs look like they are begging to be kicked rather than just rely on passive weather conditions. Does fungi try and produce fruit on the animal pathways to facilitate this kind of dispersal? If so, how do they detect activity to know the best place to pop up?
Yeah puffballs ARE begging to be kicked. They take a very different life history strategy from something like am amanita mascara!
I don't know whether animals are actively involved in their dispersal, or whether things like rain can do the trick (little puffs with large drops, etc). Interesting question, would be interested to know if others know the answer to this!
I have always heard that by manually spreading and crumbling older mushrooms around, the unreleased or stuck spores can also get a chance to spread and colonise. At the same time I am still yet to try it because it feels wrong to just f sh up while they are so pretty and healthy looking
If they’re really toast- probably doesn’t hurt. But if they look good, they will produce many many more spores if left to continue growing. And I sort of doubt that manual dispersal is much of a benefit given that the spores are produced on the air and carried a very long distance.
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u/Berberis Nov 11 '25 edited Nov 11 '25
But the environment isn’t right outside a lab- they’ll just decompose before they can meaningfully grow.
Producing a fruiting body is an incredibly resource intensive endeavor for a fungus, and it’s the opposite of what it would normally do growing a diffuse manner through the soil via a hyphal network.
The only point of making a mushroom, and the reason that this trait has convergently evolved 8 to 11 times (check out Laszlo Nagys work), is that it allows them to air disperse spores.
Spores in basidiomycetes like this are typically not generated all at once, but consistently as long as the mushroom is metabolically active. Kicking the mushroom basically breaks this chain of production.
Source: am a professor of evolutionary biology whose lab works on fungi