Block · one region of the page, as the scanner read it. It may hold a whole story, part of one, several, or an advertisement; stitching blocks into articles is the next step. Text is supplied OCR.
Page 2 · column 5 of 7 · from the scan, no model involved
How old? How many mushrooms can an individual make?
A fascinating report published several years ago in the British journal ‘Nature’ sheds some light on these questions. And it got a good bit of publicity considering it was about mushrooms. It reported results of a genetic study of the mushroomforming fungus Armillaria bulbosa in Michigan using DNAfingerprinting techniques.
The authors found that mushrooms collected over a vast geographic area could all be produced by a single gigantic interconnected individual mycelium. This confirmed the hypothesis that mushrooms are parts (fruits) of individuals, not individuals (mycelia) themselves. It also demonstrated that “individual” fungi can be enormous — a humungous fungus, as some put it!
One particular Armillaria “individual” was at least 1500 years old, covered 30 acres, and weighed nearly 100 tons, making it without question among the largest, heaviest, and oldest
88.3%