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pokermush
Waterboardingmyself toprotect America!


Registered: 09/17/06
Posts: 475
Loc: Utah
Last seen: 16 years, 1 month
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Mushrooms: Colony of organisms or single organism?
#6193306 - 10/21/06 01:04 AM (17 years, 6 months ago) |
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I'm just getting into mushroom cultivation (really enjoying it ), and one thing has really got me confused.
When mushrooms fruit, the fruit is part of a single organism, right? However, the standard way of inoculating a substrate involves breaking the mycelial growth and spreading it throughout the substrate. When you shake a jar of seeds to break the mycelia apart, doesn't each grain then hold at least one separate organism?
Taking the example of something like hen of the woods, which produces relatively few (but larger) individual fruitbodies, how do the thousands of individual mycelial organisms contribute to the production of this fruitbody? Do the mycelia merge to form a single organism, or does one organism just out-compete all the others?
If this is already answered somewhere, a link would be fine. Thanks!
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Feelers
Anti-Myth-Rhythm-Rock-Shocker


Registered: 06/18/02
Posts: 1,806
Loc: Land of Oz
Last seen: 6 years, 15 days
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Re: Mushrooms: Colony of organisms or single organism? [Re: pokermush]
#6193362 - 10/21/06 01:30 AM (17 years, 6 months ago) |
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Mushrooms themselves are made of aggregations of mycelia, they are just arranged/grow in a certain pattern.
A good way to think about how you can break up the mycleia into many seperate organisms; If you cut a branch off a tree and graft it somewhere else on the plant it will eventually function as new again. When the myc is split up it recognises itsself and rejoins all the links back together. 
You can grow a whole tree from just one cell, just as you can grow mushrooms starting with only one cell.
There are some pretty complex interactions with different mycelial colonies joining together - I believe they all share their DNA all over the place, however one strain may be more common as it is the best suited to the substrate, and get the upper hand. The different strains are all "fighting"(trying to outcompete each other) and may take over seperate areas, which is why multispore innoculations like of PF cakes come out with some quite different looking shrooms.
Have a search for multispore inoculate casings and casings using single isolates - the single isolates give a much more consistant and even flushes (that mature at the same time), which is why they are preffered by the more serious cultivators(who have the lamanir hoods etc).
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RogerRabbit
Bans for Pleasure


Registered: 03/26/03
Posts: 42,214
Loc: Seattle
Last seen: 1 year, 2 months
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Re: Mushrooms: Colony of organisms or single organism? [Re: Feelers]
#6193868 - 10/21/06 09:28 AM (17 years, 6 months ago) |
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Do a search for 'anastomosis'. RR
-------------------- Download Let's Grow Mushrooms semper in excretia sumus solim profundum variat "I've never had a failed experiment. I've only discovered 10,000 methods which do not work." Thomas Edison
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