Can Mushrooms Make It Rain?
Mushroom drool? Tears? You’ll find out…
You know what’s a really weird saying? “One person can change the world.” Because it’s never truly just one person, is it? Take climate change, for instance, you can go green; be as energy efficient as possible, eat less meat, recycle everything, or go to the extreme and live out in the woods. You can survive on the land, not using any energy at all, turn your nose at technology, and guess what?
You’re not really going to make a difference. You certainly won’t influence anyone because you know who else lived in a makeshift cabin all alone in the woods hating technology?
The Unabomber and I don’t know if you’ve heard… but he wasn’t a great guy.
What does this have to do with mushrooms? Well, mushrooms can actually make huge changes to the environment when they all work together.
By the way, to make this analogy work I’m putting aside that no amount of meatless Mondays is going to offset the very real fact that just 100 companies were responsible for 71% of greenhouse emissions and none of them were responsible for processing meat. I just want to be able to eat my hamburger on any day of the week without feeling guilty!
Now before we start talking about the fictional little Italian plumber’s favorite recreational drug- wait… are Mario and Luigi high the entire time?
Not what this article is about. Maybe in the future.
Mario and Luigi would be drooling
Before we get to mushrooms and fungus as a whole we have to know what rain is. Where it comes from. How it’s created. Why does it rain when there are no clouds around, honestly what’s up with that?
The planet, our only planet, stay out of this Mars, is covered in 71% water, most of it in the ocean. As the sun bears down on it, the water evaporates, turning into water vapor, heading up to the increasingly cold sky. Our sky also contains microscopic pieces of material like dust, smoke, and yes, even pollution.
When the water vapor meets these materials it starts to condense creating tiny water droplets. As more of these tiny water droplets form they begin to combine and you get clouds that start increasing in total weight. Eventually, they become heavy enough to fall down back to the surface in the form of rain.
It’s sort of like when you have a cold water bottle and little droplets of water start to form on the outside but you don’t notice how many have formed so when you drink it all falls down onto your pants and then you have to spend the next thirty minutes explaining to people, yet again, that you actually do have good bladder control.
I also hear some of you asking, “if pollution causes rain and rain is good, doesn’t that mean pollution is good?” To which I reply, a little hot sauce is good on anything but if I pour the entire bottle on your dish it’s going to burn on both ends.
See, while pollution can help cause rain you don’t want to pollute the air with dangerous chemicals and materials because then you get acid rain and I don’t need to explain how that’s a bad thing. It won’t burn your skin off but it will kill smaller animals and destroy crops.
Some of those things it might kill include mushrooms but what exactly are mushrooms? Mushrooms belong to the Fungi kingdom so they’re not plants or animals but something totally different. The Fungi kingdom also includes yeast and mold so they’re not generally considered part of the cool crowd but they’re definitely the Fonzie of the whole show.
Part of their cool nature is how they can reproduce on their own. We know with animals it takes two to tango, with plants many use insects to carry their pollen around, but mushrooms don’t really need anyone but nature itself. For years we’ve known thousands of species of mushrooms reproduce by releasing their spores, known as basidiospores, directly into the wind allowing them to reach new areas to germinate and give rise to more mushrooms.
But recently in 2015, researchers confirmed exactly how over 16 thousand species of mushrooms release their spores using the wind and rain. For over a century it was a mystery no one could verify since it was happening on a microscopic level and faster than a thousandth of a second.
Essentially spores are the shape of one-half of an egg shell cut vertically. When a drop of rain lands in the spore it gets stretched from the top to the bottom of the quote-unquote “shell” creating surface tension. When a second drop of water falls next to the stretched-out drop, they merge, breaking that surface tension with enough force to shoot the spore into the wind.
It’s sort of like if you took a rubber band, stretched it out, then took a pair of scissors, and cut it while it was still stretched. It’s going to go flying.
Or like a slingshot… a thousand sex slingshots
And here is where we finally answer the question at hand, how do mushrooms make it rain? If the article is titled something different it’s because I’m pretty fickle when it comes to article titles.
Remember when I said water vapor attaches itself to microscopic material in the air in order to create water droplets? Guess what one of the most common microscopic materials in the air is?
Yea, basidiospores!
This means when it rains, the water droplets cause mushroom spores to release into the air, some land eventually creating more mushrooms, while other spores stay in the air where water vapor eventually latches onto them to create more rain, which then falls onto mushrooms to create more spores. All these mushrooms work together to make the rain that benefits their species keep growing and expanding.
Mushrooms have essentially created their own positive feedback loop in nature and are thriving but, now for the negative, the climate crisis. Mushrooms tend to grow in rainforests where they are a big part of creating that rainfall as well as for the rest of the world and as our only planet heats up, fires and heat kill large portions of the forest and mushrooms.
With fewer mushrooms, the amount of rain reduces, with reduced rain comes reduced mushrooms and a serious reduction in one of the most common microscopic materials needed to make rain, meaning more droughts all over the planet.
So what can we do? Wherever you live, support your local, state, or country programs that aim to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, especially the programs or laws that go after corporations using nonrenewable resources. And if we all work together on this, the next generation will be able to eat hamburgers without guilt instead of having to wonder what it must have been like before the mushrooms went extinct.
Oh! So what’s rain? Part dirt, part water, and part mushroom babies!
