Wednesday, October 25, 2017

Because the Night is Dark and Full of ...

... Glowing things!


In this case, fungi!


Fungi that had been hiding in plain sight.


With a secret only revealed when the lights were out.


I found the glowing fungi in two places. I'm not sure if these are the same species. And the second, shown in the images immediately above and below, had a much dimmer glow.



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There are on the order of 85,000 species of fungi, 9000 of which are mushrooms. And only about 65 of these species are bioluminescent. And no one knows why. Speculation includes attracting insects to spread spores, attracting predators of the insects that eat the fungi, or that it is just a by product of other metabolic processes taking place in the organisms. What ever the reason, it was pretty cool to see here in our yard.

You can learn more here and here. (I did.)

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Last evening just before 8:00 pm the power went out. Now we have a back up power supply that keeps our internet and phone connection up, but this outage also took out our external Comcast link. And as we live in a cellphone dead zone, this meant I needed to take a walk up the street to get a cell signal. And in turn find out if the outage had been reported (it had) and when it might be rectified (estimate was 11:00 pm, it didn't come back until after midnight).

The moon was not far past new and it was also cloudy and later foggy. And thus darker than usual. And while I was out and about I noticed a glow on the wood pile.

And the rest is a blog post.

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