#fungus tw

[systimming]

Spore!Mushroom board! For @woopersuper

- Mod Primarina + Mod Spot.

((Sources of gifs: x, x, x | x, x, x | x, x, x ))

[starsweets]

two commissions for friends i got done during the sale!! (be sure to click on the images, tumblr really hates cropping longer ones lol) these are for @lame-4-u and @aerosolar respectively. my commissions are always open!

reblogs are appreciated!

[hairscare]

new resident for sleepy brook i came up with last night. shes a fungus thats taken over a human body like a zombie-ant but instead of being scary she just wants to do fall crafts and read magazines and be a #girl

[likeadog]

can u infodump about ergotism to me I don't understand the joke and know you're more interesting than google

ok so basically ergotism (st anthonys fire) is the result of an infection by ergot, a type of fungus that looooves 2 grow on grain and especially rye, which is problematic bc rye for a long time was the best crop to survive over a soggy winter.

it forms these strange purple sclerotium on the wheat (although some disguise themselves as ones that look more like seeds, making it harder to find) which can be accidentally ground in with the wheat if not properly filtered. they have an insane variety of alkaloids that give them their toxicity and while about 50% of them are cooked out, its more than enough to make you sick!

ergotism takes two forms: gangrenous and convulsive. convulsive is the most famous type: it causes convulsions, hallucinations, delirium, etc, but the gangrenous is the most common because ergot is actually used to make medications for migraines and other conditions, and the purified alkaloids only really cause the gangrenous type. you have to od for this tho

gangrenous as the name suggests causes vasodilation in extremities that cause gangrene to develop. you also get full body sores and gastrointestinal distress

the alkaloids in ergotism are also closely related to LSD, hence the hallucinogenic effects. it can also cause euphoria-- but it's really not worth the risk

theres a popular theory that it may be responsible for the salem witch trial hysteria, but ergotism has been known for hundreds of years in western europe, so some say its unlikely they wouldnt recognize it. then again, some argue that it may have been a different type of ergot that would have different alkaloid combinations, so who knows!

[chocolatechipkraken]

Some dudes for Funguary!

[sevenofreds]

The fungi are flourishing today

This last one is my personal favorite just LOOK AT THIS BIG BOI

[muckyz]

CORDYCEPS SOLDIER

[scattered-sense]

This is basically just a copy and paste of a text document I started working on. It might be hateable but the more I think about it the more it stands out to me as something that's less magical than gold dust or magic Sodor coal, and adheres more to how we see them depicted in the stories. If anyone can offer a better idea definitely do, I'm not a biologist so I'm certain there are things here that are incredibly unrealistic, but I mean, the very concept is unrealistic so I have a little lee-way there... right? Of course, if you have ways to improve it, I'm all ears.

Faces

An engine's Face is a fungal colony. This colony is a member of a species that, in 1810, took on DNA from human workers (mostly male at the time, and thus why the majority of engines show male characteristics unless they choose not to), and grew on a smokebox door, having drifted on it as a spore from rot living in the wood of the building. As such, the species developed to favor smokebox darts as nucleation sites, their nose being the first "cells" to develop.

Aging: Faces don't age for the first few months following exposure to new spores to replace dying "cells", then age very rapidly over the next two years such that a Face that appears to be the human age of twenty will appear eighty, then slowly deteriorating further as "cells" from the rest of the engine's body replace those on the Face, feeling to it like losing more and more sensory input, until roughly the third or fourth year, at which point the colony has died completely. The engine can still be used, as in America where Faces are not seen often after the nineteenth century due to commonly-used aluminum smokebox paints being toxic to them, them being a known allergen that significantly disproportionally affects people of Native American and Mexican descent (Randall, Jespersen, et. al., 1934), and pressure from conservation groups trying to reduce the number of non-native species being introduced to North America and interest groups not wanting growing labor laws to be ruled in court to apply to engines too (leading the Face to only be seen in preservation, and a compound created to prevent new spore formation except for dedicated maintenance periods where they are collected to reapply on the engine later), but the new colony will not have continuity from the former. Generally, if enough of it gets on an engine to grow a Face, most railways won't do anything about it and will generally tentatively earmark it to give to a museum that can take care of them subject to the engine wanting to be preserved, but they will start meticulously coating their stock with the compound so as to prevent further examples. Engines are usually given new spores every three months or so, and though they all age differently, this is roughly frequent enough that they visually age rather slowly. A Face can often decide for itself how it would like to age, though, and this is usually seen in preservation. Iron Duke, as an example, though a young engine, was intentionally aged by being held in quarantine for a year or so. He thinks it suits him, and helps tell the story of his class much better than if he'd aged at a more conventional rate.

Diet and vascular system: Faces have a "vascular" system with "blood" that transfers information between the members, binding proteins onto iron-oxide rich water. A Face's colony will unconsciously eat into any holes that are formed in the paint in quick order if they are running low on iron, so often, a Face will be given a cube of iron or a piece of scrap to chew on as if it were a piece of gum. This absorbs through their mouth into their "blood"stream.

Engine-Colony Interface: The species grows all over the parts of the engine that don't move, right up to parts that do. Thus, they can sense stuff like boiler pressure, draught, or for ICE engines, how their prime movers are doing (if their block is made of steel or iron, not aluminum), information that moves up to their Face and, while it's not exactly the same sensations as a mammal might have (like "pain" in our sense of the word), it's functionally equivalent. If they grow enough, and aren't cut away from them, they can have access to their controls, but usually they only use them if they need to, and most companies historically trimmed them back from them, nowadays usually they make controls out of aluminum.

Two Faces, or Two Identities: For steam, generally, they are most comfortable near the smokebox because that's where it's warmest. Some engines might have a second Face, but that does take some effort. For diesels, they don't get as much heat from either end, but after being convinced to grow on one side, they often end up growing on the other for better visibility, because they already made the effort to grow on one side anyway, so they might as well. Each Face can be controlled independently, and both eyes are seeing things at the same time. Speech can come from either end, and the colony can control both at the same time, so either mouth can talk depending on which direction they want to talk in, the other Face's eyes still able to look around. There's a subspecies that started emerging circa 1979 where each Face is semi-independent, but if they're connected, they do have a continuity of identity between each, and generally one Face won't talk while the other is. However, if the halves are cut down the middle perfectly (this can be much tricker than you might think, as you'd need to cut them on the inside of the locomotive as well), they can form two identities that are fully independent. Mighty and Mac, while an invention of the television show, are a good example of this. It's generally looked down upon in most circumstances to spray one side with aluminum, though there are the occasional reasons to, like one side develops a mycoparasite, or just feels their time is up. Or, if the engine is to be scrapped, they will often be given a little more time before being hosed down with aluminum-rich water, before being cut up.

For your consideration:

The Faces are fungal colonies living on locomotives (they like the heat from them) that took on some human DNA. The first engine to have a face had it accidentally, having had a worker's hair fall on the colony while it was growing on some engine in the 1820s, but by the 1840s samples of this new species, each one being given genetic information from a few new people to hopefully grow unique identities on each engine, were being kept in tins to paint on smokebox doors for their utility in being a third set of eyes. They can also grow around their boilers to reach their controls and have some level of autonomy, but if that's cut down it doesn't kill the colony.

These colonies can swivel around their doors, age differently from humans, and if the original door is damaged beyond repair or is to be scrapped, can transfer over to a similarly sized door.

Which does mean Henry's smokebox door was laying on top of a Stanier smokebox door as a large, grayish peach, vaguely twenty-something face (the actual Henry himself) slid like a melty cheese in folds off the Ivatt/Gresley-built door, the original engine being scrapped but Henry himself moving on to a new, for lack of a better term, host.

I'm having complicated feelings about this one. Top marks for creativity, of course. I think I want to not hear more.

[diamondnokouzai]

so i think my cough came about bc of fungus/mold because my dorm sink is full of mold and vinegar wont kill it, ive scrubbed it 6 times this year. so i think theres fungus in my lungs and idk if thats a reasonable fear or not.

[lichenaday]

Collemopsidium foveolatum

Yep, we put some trypophobia on your trypophobia, in case that wasn't enough trypophobia for you. C. foveolatum is a crustose lichen that grows embedded in the shells of barnacles, limpets, and bivalves which hang out just above the average tide level. It has a thin, inconspicuous, beige or gray thallus dotted with crater-like, black perithecia. It has a cyanobacterial photobiont which is what allows it to survive in such a constantly wet environment. C. foveolatum might be widespread but may also be substrate/location specific, but more work is needed to fully understand this cryptic and variable genus. It still just blows my mind that these guys exist. There are lichens living in the driest deserts, and there are lichens living half submerged in the sea. They've got the range.

images: source

info: source | source

[scopnotes]

Creepy crawlies

[phoebepheebsphibs]

You’ve been spore’d!!

(No pressure to respond!)

(The way I screamed with excitement when I saw this ask)

Donnie's biggest fear....

It's gonna get spoopy

SPOOPERS

Anyways uh spoiler alert i guess teehee

@tmntaucompetition @boots-with-the-fur-club

Prev || next || overanalyzing Donnie’s fear

[hirochuu]

oc doodle

[sporeclan]

< Previous | First | Next >

Short but somehow VERY eventful moon this time! Sorry to any Cinnamonpaw fans out there </3

[kingmaxstatic]

An alien brain fungus that's charitable sure does lead to situations! Maybe not always great situations but still...!

[lionfloss]

Cordyceps fungus infects tarantula