Nature & living things

A fungus that can't spread until a raindrop hits it

These tiny cups spent centuries being misread — the "eggs" inside them look so much like seeds that early observers took them for exactly that. They are actually spore packets tethered to the cup wall by an elastic cord, and the whole structure is built around a single mechanical event: a raindrop landing hard enough to eject them. The traits used to sort the 45 species for generations, like the ridging on the cup, are now under suspicion as genetic work redraws the family tree. Meanwhile the genus turns out to make bioactive compounds and lignin-eating enzymes with possible uses in cleaning up contaminated ground.

Some species grow straight out of cow and horse dung, and one of them, Cyathus stercoreus, is now classed as endangered in several European countries.

Read the whole of Cyathus on Wikipedia

The article comes from Wikipedia and is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. The introduction above is our own.