Why the Largest Living Thing Is Not What You Think

hey 42 here what exactly is an organism it seems a simple enough question but it's one that's befuddled biologists for many years you might think it's something along the lines of a single living thing or perhaps something that couldn't function if it was split up and both those answers aren't too different to many of the standard definitions out there but it isn't quite as simple as that let me give you an example you watching this video are made up of lots of individual cells and when i say lots what i really mean is about 40 trillion every single one of those cells fulfills both of the definitions i just mentioned they are individual living things and if you chop them up into pieces they die they even reproduce another common factor that crops up in definitions of what makes something an organism so does that mean you are not in fact one individual organism but a coalition of 40 trillion little ones well no the first each of your cells is built from the same blueprint your dna meaning they're genetically uniform but more importantly all of your cells work together to serve a common purpose keeping you alive evolutionary biologists david kweller and joan strassman believed this shared purpose is key to what makes something an organism they've devised their own definition which is that something is an organism if its parts work together for the benefit of the integrated whole with high cooperation and low conflict what's particularly interesting about this definition is that it doesn't necessarily require that an organism is an individual entity a colony of honeybees for example could be considered a single organism because all the bees work together for the good of the whole just like all the cells in your body work together to keep you alive so with this definition in mind which organism out there takes the prize for being the most humongous biomorphic mahousy thing on the planet under some of our old outdated definitions of what an organism is one of the first creatures that springs to mind is the undisputed heavyweight champion of the animal kingdom officially weighing in at 150 tons this 25 meter goliath is universally recognized as the largest animal to have ever existed bigger even than the mightiest dinosaur it's the undefeated champion of the sea with a tongue as heavy as an elephant the blue whale this magnificent mammal was hunted almost to the point of extinction but thanks to the ban on blue whale hunting in 1967 it's making a slow and steady comeback but if you think 150 tons is heavy that's nothing compared to our next contender weighing in at more than 6 000 tons that's as much as 40 blue whales and living high on a utah plateau it's a morbidly obese panda just kidding the heaviest organism in the plant kingdom is in fact a single quaking aspen tree named pando that's taken over the fish lake national forest although pando can deceive its opponents by disguising itself as a forest of many regular sized trees it's actually a single clonal organism that grew from one teeny tiny seed long ago and since all 47 000 stems are part of the same organism the forest behaves very unusually indeed in the autumn the leaves of every single individual tree turn from green to gold at the exact same time and the colony can use its vast network of roots to distribute nutrients to different areas as needed if we're measuring size by height rather than weight then the plant kingdom has a second contender for the largest organism also from america it's a californian redwood named hyperion standing at a whopping 115 meters hyperion is 19 meters taller than big ben and 22 meters taller than the statue of liberty and although it's already 600 years old that's a young whippersnapper in the world of trees and biologists anticipate it will grow even taller as it reaches adulthood but oddly enough the title for the largest organism on earth doesn't go to a contender from the animal kingdom or the plant kingdom in terms of length and weight the winner overshadows the blue whale pando and hyperion it dwells in the blue mountains in oregon and is forced to weigh at least 35 000 tons that's around 3 000 fire engines or 1.5 sphinxes if you're the kind of weirdo who likes to weigh things in sphinxes it uses an underground network to attack and steal from others and is widely seen as an unstoppable menace it's a fungus honey fungus to be precise back in 1998 a team from the u.s forest service set out to investigate why so many trees were dying in the malair national forest their tests showed that nearly all of them had been infected with a type of honey fungus known as armillaria solidifies that in itself probably didn't come as a huge shock this particular type of fungus is feared by gardeners throughout the world having gained a reputation as an insidious parasite that can kill off complete woodlands quickly and without mercy but the team wanted to know exactly how many fungal bodies they were up against one impressive if slightly disturbing trait of honey fungi is that they can identify and connect to each other knowing this trait the team took samples from 112 dead and dying trees around the forest and grew them in pairs in petri dishes by seeing which ones fused and which ones rejected each other the team found that 61 of the trees some of which were nearly four kilometers apart had been struck by the same clonal colony in other words they'd all been taken down by the same single organism of honey fungus the team calculated that this humongous fungus covered an area of around 10 square kilometers and could be more than 8 000 years old antonio caluccio an award-winning italian chef loved a bit of honey fungus especially with spaghetti sliced garlic and a bit of fresh red chili but he probably didn't cook the main part of it because when most people talk about fungus they're referring to the delicate often colorful fruiting body we see growing above ground the reproductive structures otherwise known as mushrooms but beneath its delicate yellow brown mushrooms the hoodie fungus is made up of rhizomorphs black twisting rope-like structures that spread across landscapes in search of new hosts and mycelium if you've already seen my video on magic mushrooms you'll know mycelium is a pretty big deal if you were to pull up a mushroom from the ground the mycelium would be the white stringy stuff beneath it that looks like an extreme death metal band logo it's tenaciously strong incredibly efficient at digesting food and perhaps most disturbingly of all sentient at least in a broad sense mycelium knows you're there and if you were to walk across the ground above it it would sense your movements and respond yeah it kind of gives a romantic woodland stroll an entirely different vibe doesn't it mycelium can even link the roots of different plants together acting like a kind of fungal internet some plants use this tool for good by giving nutrients to other plants in need or warning them of threats others turn to a life of cybercrime and steel nutrients and the craftiest attacked their main rivals by slowly drip feeding toxic chemicals into their connecting mycelia so we know mycelium is pretty useful stuff and plants and trees certainly use it to their advantage but what about fungus itself how can something as vast and sprawling as acelidopies use mycelium to conquer an entire forest well it comes down to two attributes fungi are extremely good problem solvers and they also have some seriously innovative communication skills if you were to arrange some soil in the shape of great britain place pieces of wood where the cities would be and then introduce a wood-eating fungus something pretty amazing would happen before long its mycelium would broadly replicate the existing uk motorway network in other words it would figure out the shortest distance between each piece of food not only that but if you've suddenly had an overwhelming urge to channel godzilla and destroy one of these roads the fungus would simply use an alternative pathway until it was able to return the original to its former glory a skill that comes in extremely useful when negotiating vast and ever-changing forest landscapes it's this impressive ability to solve problems find alternative solutions and even remember original solutions that has caused many to question whether fungi are in fact intelligent and crazy as it sounds it's definitely possible traditionally academics have talked about the meaning of intelligence within the context of humans which is probably why we tend to assume intelligence requires a brain or at the very least a kind of central hub of activity american psychologist louis leon furstone for example claimed intelligence partly depended on the ability to reason and produce words fluently something we think fungi aren't capable of just yet hopefully but more recently intelligence has been viewed more flexibly taking into account things like the ability to solve problems making choices between two different causes of action and communicate with particularly large fungal bodies their method of communication has been the focus of a lot of research how are they able to coordinate what's happening in one part of their network with another especially when either part could be up to four kilometers away as is the case with acelidopies this remains one of the big questions in fungal biology and there are a few ideas floating around but one of the most exciting possibilities is that fungi use electricity to communicate rather than chemicals back in the 90s a swedish researcher called stefan olsen borrowed a microelectric rig a fairly common piece of equipment in neurobiology labs from a colleague who was studying the way nerve fibers fire in moth brains being the inquisitive sort he wanted to know what would happen if he took the rig and hooked it up to a fungal mycelium network his curiosity paid off because it turned out mycelium did produce spontaneous electrical impulses olsen then introduced some blocks of wood as a source of food for the fungus and the speed of the impulses increased suggesting the existence of a signaling system fast enough to be used by even the largest fungal bodies to send and receive information and the system that fast could only be electrical and the fun doesn't stop there what if we human beings could use this system of electrical impulses to listen to fungi and learn things from them i know it's the kind of question you'd hear from your slightly eccentric and highly intoxicated friend on the way home from a long night out but one man andrew adamanski tackled this question completely sober ademansky is a british computer scientist and the director of the unconventional computing laboratory he's conducted all sorts of weird and wonderful experiments in the past like using slime molds as components of nano-robotic systems and to help out with city planning and he thought your mate dave had a weird job he's also come up with the ingenious idea that we could use fungi as biological computing networks basically if we plugged electrodes into a mushroom and learned to decode its electrical signals we could theoretically pay attention to what's going on in different parts of its mycelia network maybe even using it as a kind of large-scale environmental sensor three years ago adamanski applied a range of different stimuli to oyster fungi including changes in light temperature and mechanical pressure as well as chemicals like chloroform to make them sleepy and even cortisol to stress them out a little bit by analyzing the resulting spikes in electrical activity he found the fungi responded differently to each different stimulus and that it was possible to map their responses and interpret them adamanski has suggested this system could be used to tell us things about a fungus natural environment things like the health of the forest it inhabits the way other trees and plants are distributed within it or even the funguses intentions like where it wants to grow yes fungi can be picky and right now he and his team at uwe bristol are developing a revolutionary type of smart building made with fungi one that can react to changes in light temperature air pollutants and even perhaps a little disturbingly the presence of people within it living fungi grown inside the building structure will act as a sensor to detect these different stimuli and then computers will analyze the information when particular changes are recognized the system will respond by controlling connected devices like lights and heaters so we're not yet at the point of speaking directly to fungi ourselves but we're certainly figuring out more inventive ways to interact with them than simply frying them up with spaghetti and it feels fairly collaborative at least for now but next time you purchase a pack of button mushrooms at the supermarket just remember they may be tasty and bite-sized but they have a big brother that's larger than you and larger than any other organism in existence it's probably sentient and might soon be occupying your home thanks for watching you can get your hands on my book stick a flag in it over on amazon or on audible links to both in the description below thank you

Channel: Thoughty2

Views: 384,703

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Length: 15min 58sec (958 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 03 2021