A toxin that helps oyster mushrooms devour worm flesh
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
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And then some animals, including humans, extended their "internal" digestion process to include, in some cases, external processing from removing husks to, yes, enzymatic pre-processing before consumption. I love how messy "life" is.
I wonder how far "back" the use of symbiotic creatures in digestion goes. We certainly can't survive without them. I believe some coral and even simpler organisms have a similar dependency.
I say nominally distinct because from a philosophical standpoint it makes a point about where "we" end and "other" begins. Our microbiome consists of distinct organisms but it is also kind of "us".
> it makes a point about where "we" end and "other" begins.
Due to illness, last year I had a major course of antibiotics, and after that I repopulated my gut by eating joghurt, not taking “probiotic” capsules. My diet has changed. This has made me wonder who wanted that doughnut: me, or some fellow traveler in my gut.
That sounds very difficult to believe.
All life shares common elements, see the large and small mitochondrial subunits (rRNA). They are so critical to producing celluar energy that there are sequences are incredibly conserved, such that databases exists with aligments across life.
There are several major types of plastids, and two are well-known: chloroplasts, and chromoplasts.
Plastids emerged from symbiotic assimilation, as did the mitochondria.
The signals that mushrooms send to each other through their mycelium network have the same physical and chemical mechanisms as the brain and neurological networks.
(Mushroom is a small part of the overall organism, it's just the fruiting body)
You can trace a path from, say, the back of your knee, through the intestines, and out to your eye lid, as you can trace a path from any point on a the outside of a torus.
We're just a very complicated doughnut.
It's something a medical scientist type I studied under was fond of saying, and I find it a useful model
6 paragraphs and two images later, they deign to tell you the identity.
I really find this kind of science journalism irritating. It's not a murder mystery, it's a digest (ha) of some research. Just spit it out and don't make me wonder if I've accidentally a word. Then go into how they figured it out and they won't have to obliquely refer to it as the "toxin" or "substance".
I suppose other than feeling like they're "real writers" for building the suspense just like that TED talk on Creative Writing taught them, it lengthens dwell times if they drip feed it, which is good for the Metrics.
The answer is 3-octanone by the way. See how I could have said that up front and not have to find clumsy workarounds if I needed to refer to it again?
I thought it was interesting because (a) I didn't know fungi were (or intentionally) carnivorous and (b) it's interesting that something I've encountered in lavender etc is so toxic to these creatures.
I get where you're coming from, but I thought there was plenty of other interesting material in the piece. It was NOT, IMHO, the usual "12 paragraphs of nothing then the answer at the end" that I think we both have come to expect?
Describing the toxocysts without naming them as "globes they compare to lollipops" is very clumsy too. Compare how? Favourably? And why not just use the word "toxocyst" right there so that when they refer to it later the reference[1] is explicit? Additionally, anyone who knows the words toxo- and -cyst will also have an immediate clear understanding of what it is. It's also argubly adding vagueness because it's missed out that it's specifically the shape, and not any other lollipop-like quality that's been referenced.
Look at how it was written in the original paper:
> In this study, we show through genetic screens that P. ostreatus relies on a specialized structure, toxocysts, to paralyze the nematode C. elegans. A volatile compound, 3-octanone, stored inside toxocysts...
See how they don't tease it, and just get on with saying it and just make it clear first time round?
I'd have been marked down for the writing in my English lessons, and I wasn't even being paid to write this stuff. Then again, I wasn't bring marked based on website analytics.
[1] "small globes called toxocysts that hang like fruit from the hyphae"
Off to the sauna!