And when the split gill mushroom came into contact with a foreign piece of wood, Adamantzky noticed a significant spike in electrical signals. This suggested that the mushroom was notifying other fungi on the same mycelium network that food was available.
Since observing the communications, Adamantzky explained how the “words” are no different than how wolves howl or cats hiss. He also decided to mathematically distinguish the various words after realizing that they spiked in clusters.
And Adamantzky found that the average fungi word length was just shy of six letters– as compared to the five-letter average word length in English.
However, some other scientists are still quite skeptical of the study. For example, Dan Bebber of the University of Exeter claims that we still have a long way to go before we can actually translate what the organisms are communicating.
“Though interesting, the interpretation as a language seems somewhat overenthusiastic and would require far more research and testing of critical hypotheses before we see ‘Fungus’ on Google Translate,” Bebber said.
To read the study’s complete findings, which have since been published in the Royal Society Open Science journal, visit the link here.
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