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Comment by jc6 | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me. I saw a bizarre fungus growing on an old Airport audio speaker left in storage. The speaker was a 5 foot high metallic tower. And this 4 inch high alien looking thing was growing on it. It had attached itself via a beautiful root like system of tenticles to the metal surface. Some one tried to kick it off and it was so tightly fused to the metal it broke the stem but the root system stayed fused. So they then scraped it off with like a chisel and there was a hole in the metal underneath. It looked like it was eating the metal. These were ancient speakers so that metalic frame was quite thick and heavy and it was really freaky to see how it had been sort of dissolved away. That storage unit hadnt been opened in 2 months. So the growth couldnt have been very old either. Left us all wondering what things would have looked like if no one had bothered to open the unit.

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It might be some form of metal corrosion. The change from metal to metal oxide can be accompanied by an increase in volume which can lead to some very fanciful structures.

I have seen Aluminum turn into what looks like phyllo dough when near a coastline, exposed to salt air. The edge of a 1/2 inch thick sheet was fanned out, split and flaking away.

Are you sure that wasn't iron/steel? I've seen long term degradation of the sort you describe with those, but IME aluminum tends to get pitted and chalky.

Yeah this, was it "orange"?

Your story reminded me of one of my own:

A few years back I was helping clear out my parents’ garage, as they were having plumbing issues and needed a path cleared for the plumber. Eventually I come across a strange looking box with some weird brown tubes poking out of it. I look up at the ceiling, and see the waste pipe from a toilet. There was not only a hole in the ceiling, but a huge hole in the top of the waste pipe.

Turns out that strange box was full of newspapers that had had raw sewage dripping onto it for who knows how long. Those “brown tubes” were actually some sort of fungus, and when I looked closer, it was quite literally spewing out spores. It looked like steam.

I was horrified at the idea of this fungus surviving on nothing but sewage and ran to grab a respirator before rushing the thing into a compost bin. Wish I’d taken a photo, but my mind was elsewhere at the time.

Scary. Its really fascinating how they have such capacity to spread into every nook they can find. We spent a lot of time wondering how such an exotic looking thing, showed up in basically an urban closed off area (barely any windows) where you rarely see any kind of fungus growing. Must be producing a ton of spores.

Oh man, this would make a cool Dr. House episode resolution.

Or the end of the intro for last of us 3

The strange fungus is probably engineeriei cubifarmiculi.

These also grow inside electronic devices and nasa facilities.

I hope someone here knows what this is because that sounds really cool

My best guess is that the hole was there before the mushroom grew. It is hard to find a biological species that need so much iron in their metabolism to the point it evolved something that can dissolve pure metal in a matter of 1-2 months. Irons are often used in enzymes and usually the ratio is around a few iron atoms bounded in a structure of thousands or tens of thousands of carbons and hydrogen atoms. To use so much iron implied that mushroom is literally chock full of special enzymes and I doubt it actually is.

More likely, something broke a hole there and the mushroom grew on it and capitalized on the broken edges to scavenge some extra irons but it did not punch that hole by itself.

I dont know what metal that was but there was a grey coat of paint on it. Sometimes they coat the metal to prevent rusting or whatever, but the rusting happens under the coating anyway. So maybe possible the underlying metal was rusting and the fungus was feasting on the coating. It was quite a humid space.

cordyceps ant zombie fungus which inspired "last of us" tv series

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/w1ibC4lf4Dw

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