Dung-loving Fun Guys
If you’re like me, then you spend A LOT of time sitting on the toilet and wondering what happens to the billions of tons of crap that plops out of cows and other herbivores each year. Where does it all go? It can’t all be used to make sculptures like this Einstien one at Princeton? Can it?
Of course not. We rely on microscopic coprophilous, or dung-loving fungi, to gobble up all of those cow pies. Some new research is out that shows how these little shit eating fungi survive.
Sidenote: I really wish we learned about coprophilous in middle school. Because then Chris Jr. could have raisied his pudgy little hand and asked Sister Bernard (my 6th grade teacher) the following question, and totally have gotten away with it:
“Sister Bernard, are there any of these poo-loving organisims in this classroom as we speak? No? That’s strange. I feel like I’m surrounded by feces-eating fungi every time I set foot in school.”
Since the coprophilous spores need to be eaten by cows in order to survive, they had a little problem. Unlike people, cows don’t eat their own shit.
Before you challenge me on that last line, you might want to have your toothbrush checked for fecal matter.
So what did the fungi evolve to do? Simple. They developed squirt guns.
What they do is they lauch their spores out away from the cow poop, kind of like how Superman’s parent’s launched him away from a dying Krypton so that he could survive (just replace Krypton with a cow pie, and Superman with a mushroom, and you’re pretty much there).
Here’s a timelapse photo of this happening. Weeeeeeeeeee!
If you’re that special kind of person who thinks that fungi shooting spores out of steaming piles of crap is a wonderful and beautiful thing, then you’re in luck. One of the students (Hayley Kilroy) who worked on the project, and helped record the above image, is setting video of the shit-eating spore launch to music (Hayley, I’m thinking The Final Countdown by Europe will do nicely) and plans to post it on Youtube at some point. So stay tuned for that.
(via Science Daily)
