Friday beautiful science

Here's a video I've been dying to post since I first saw it a few months ago. Blogger now makes it easy to post videos that aren't on YouTube. The video function choked today, and I had to get put the video on Youtube.

As described on the Cornell Mushroom Blog:

Here’s something I know you’ve all been dying to see. A video of one of the most compellingly jaw-dropping spectacles in mycology, condensed from four days of electrifying footage. What you can’t see is the stink, the awesome stink associated with this event. It caused our noble departmental photographer, Kent Loeffler, to vent the noxious, carrion-like fumes into the fourth floor hallway outside my office. We have all suffered here in the service of science.

There are two fungi in this video. On your right, the common pinkish-stemmed Phallus ravenelii. On your left, the rarer, paler, netted stinkhorn, Dictyophora duplicata. Note also the guest appearance by Hubert the fly (aka “The Vector”) late in the video! Oh! the humanity.

To preemptively answer your insightful questions, let me clarify a few points. The stinkiness is part of the dispersal mechanism of the crafty stinkhorn. The green goop covering the heads is a spore slurry that stinks in a sultry way and attracts flies and such. Insects disperse the spores on their little feet. Why does the mushroom look this way? I can’t say, but I can assure you that you’re not the first to notice a certain resemblance. The stinkhorns belong to an order of fungi called the Phallales. They have been causing trouble for a long time, and first got their suggestive Latin name in 1564.

More cool time-lapse videos here.

via Small Things Considered.