(no subject)

[puddleshark]

Comments

[nikonf3]

What confident little monsters. And they pose nicely too.

[puddleshark]

Yes! Such deliberate angles - like a group of supermodels!

[larryhammer]

Cooooool.

[puddleshark]

Fabulous year here for toadstools!

[velvetchamber]

What a lovely shot!

(I just pressed the random journal button, and wound up here.)

[puddleshark]

Thanks! Sometimes the toadstools arrange themselves so beautifully - impossible to resist taking their picture!

[velvetchamber]

Indeed! Fungi also tend to grow in interesting places, so one often has a sense of discovery when stumbling upon lovely specimens. In particular with the knowledge that the fruiting body is just a tiny and temporally transient part of the entire organism. They are all around, and only sometimes can we see them.

[puddleshark]

Yes. I read somewhere that a whole forest may be connected by mycorrhizal networks... But all we see are these beautiful, fleeting fruiting bodies.

[velvetchamber]

Yeah, it is an interesting question of what makes an individual organism and what doesn't. For us mobile and discrete beings it seems pretty straight-forwards, but our viewpoint is in a sense limited by that. Just like how some forests are more or less a clonal expansion of only one or a few genetically distinct "individuals". Begging the question whether a tree in such a forest is an individual, or whether it is more akin to a branch on a bush.