Do mushrooms "talk" to each other?

No, we haven't lost our marbles, we really are wondering if mushrooms can talk to each other! And we aren't the only ones. In fact, a group of scientists in Japan asked themselves the same question and decided to probe deeper!

Well, the scientists found out that mushrooms can communicate with each other and they get especially talkative just after a really heavy rainfall!

You might think mushrooms are plants but they actually belong to a whole different type of biological kingdom known as fungi, and they’re a lot more complicated than you think. 

Mushrooms make up just one part of a larger organism that spends most of its lifecycle underground growing and forming webs of mycelium according to Salon’s Troy Farah. 

Farah explained in a recent article that the mushroom part of a fungus only forms when it is ready to reproduce and some can form special symbiotic relationships with trees. 

It was one of these special mushrooms known as Laccaria bicolor that researchers in Japan were studying when they discovered that mushrooms like to talk to each other. 

Scientists have been studying the ability of mushrooms to communicate through the transfer of electrical signals to one another for quite a while according to a press release from Tohoku University, but the current research and evidence are still very sparse.

“It is thought that fungi generate electrical signals in response to external stimuli and use these signals to communicate with each other, coordinating growth and other behavior,” the press release added. But now there is some proof the theory is true. 

Yu Fukasawa led a team of researchers from Tohoku University into the forest in 2021 and used electrodes on six different mushrooms to see if they could record any chatter.  

After two weeks, heavy rainfall swept the area and seemed to bring the mushrooms to life, which is when Fukasawa’s team discovered a flurry of activity according to Farah. 

"In the beginning, the mushrooms exhibited less electrical potential, and we boiled this down to the lack of precipitation," Fukasawa explained in a statement on his research. 

"However, the electrical potential began to fluctuate after raining, sometimes going over 100 mV," Fukasawa added, which he interpreted as communication between the fungi. 

In the abstract of Fukasawa and his team's study, the researchers noted that the transfer of electrical signals between mushrooms was strongest between those that were closest, which they believed may indicate that there was some directionality in the conversations. 

The evidence gathered by Fukasawa’s team has proven to be promising but they noted that more research under field conditions was needed to further explore the theory. 

"Our results confirm the need for further studies on fungal electrical potentials under a true ecological context," adds Fukasawa, the details of which were published in Fungal Ecology. 

In early April 2023, a similar study on electrical activity in mushrooms conducted by Professor Andrew Adamatzky and published by The Royal  Society Open Science found that some Mushrooms could have vocabularies of up to 50 words according to The Guardian. 

More surprising than the finding that mushrooms have vocabularies was the evidence that suggested the vocabulary might be closely related to those spoken by humans. 

“We do not know if there is a direct relationship between spiking patterns in fungi and human speech. Possibly not,” Adamatzky said according to The Guardian’s reporting. 

“On the other hand, there are many similarities in information processing in living substrates of different classes, families, and species. I was just curious to compare,” Adamatzky added.

At present there is no definitive proof that mushrooms are speaking with one another in a way humans could recognize. But as science continues to explore the phenomenon we are getting close to understanding the mysteries of mushrooms and their world.