Can confirm. I've been curious about mushrooms for years and joined a mushroom pick. There's another guy who is normal like me. But everyone else, I'm 90% sure are forest druids and like a slow zombie bite, I'm already seeing myself become a crazy kook.

Mushrooms took me on a magical adventure where I met a wizard.

You mean The Professor Paul Stamets, who wears a big hat that is one big mushroom? The one with a species of mushroom named after him? The one with honorifics in warp speed pop culture, and those who feed lemmings memes?

Cuz he's a cool dude.

Honestly, I'm not a mycologist, so someone with more expertise feel free to correct me, but I'm pretty sure that's BS.

Slime mold is a protist not fungi :0. I'm just being a jerk here doesn't matter lol. I love the slime molds they're so cool I always liked having them in the lab each year as a teaching tool. Definitely venom

No. Stop asking questions.

For some reason, I now have the urge to bury you in wet shady soil.

So most fungi do have a lifespan, they have teleomere decay, and when you're cloning mushrooms (from propagating mycelia) you have to let them go to fruit (the part that looks like a mushroom) every now and then. It's a pain in the ass.

But like the other poster said, they play it fast and loose with which part you consider the "organism". My favorite thing is that they do cytosolic streaming. Genetics can be a pain on mushrooms because not only do they share nutrients and metabolic burden through mycelia, they can share nuclei.

One of the weird convienent realities we used extensively is that cells are big enough you can spread them over a petri dish with a little loop, and if you diluted the initial sample enough, the colonies that developed were, practically speaking, from one parent cell. So you could try to modify a bunch, and then plate them (spreading the cells around) and pick individual colonies that were all clones from a single parent. Fungi mycelia means the nucleus isn't stuck in one cell. It also means expression levels can be variable (some cells will have multiple nuclei, and then later maybe they don't).

Fungi are a godamn pain in the ass to study. They're not mysterious, they're not alien, they're just fucking assholes.

Based on the Wikipedia article on biological immortality referencing species that live for a couple hundred years and the Wikipedia page on armillaria ostoyae mentioning living specimens that are multiple millenia old (and thousands of acres large!), I'm guessing that may be what the prof is referring to?

I have found that a mix of olive oil, butter, garlic, parsley, salt and pepper makes their deaths matter a lot.

Why does the way I kill them have to matter?