Clever Ways to Travel

The travel problem

A spore cannot walk, swim, or fly on its own. It has no legs, no wings, and no muscles. Yet fungi manage to scatter their spores across gardens, forests, and even entire continents. How? Over millions of years, different fungi have evolved brilliant, and sometimes very strange, ways to hitch a ride.

Catching the wind

Most gilled mushrooms, the kind with thin papery ridges under the cap, release spores straight into the air and let the wind do the work. Underneath the cap, the gills are lined with millions of spore-making cells. When spores are ready, they are flicked off the gill's surface into the tiny gaps between the gills, drift down and out from under the cap, and rise on the smallest air currents.

This is why mushroom caps are shaped like little umbrellas held up on a stalk: raising the gills above the ground gives spores a clear runway of moving air to catch.

Splashing in the rain

Some fungi use raindrops instead of wind. Bird's nest fungi are a wonderful example. Each tiny fungus looks like a miniature nest full of little "eggs," which are actually spore-packed capsules. When a heavy raindrop falls directly into the nest, it splashes the capsules out and can fling them more than a metre away, where they stick to nearby leaves and twigs.

Hitching a ride on animals

Other fungi rely on living couriers. Some spores are sticky and cling to the fur, feathers, or feet of passing animals, dropping off wherever the animal wanders next. Others take a much more direct route: an animal eats the fungus, and the tough spores survive the journey through the animal's gut completely unharmed, coming out the other end ready to grow, often far from where they started, with a helpful pile of fertiliser included.

Stinky tricks and popping puffballs

A few fungi have evolved truly astonishing tricks. Stinkhorns grow a slimy cap that smells like rotting meat, an odour that is unpleasant to us but irresistible to flies. Flies land, eat the slime, and carry sticky spores away on their legs and bodies to wherever they land next, spreading spores far more precisely than the wind ever could.

Puffballs take a completely different approach. Instead of gills, they fill up with a powder-fine cloud of spores inside a papery ball. When a raindrop, footstep, or curious animal bumps the ball, it releases a visible puff of spores into the air, like a tiny smoke signal.

Some fungi go even further and can actively shoot their spores. Certain mushrooms build up a tiny droplet of water at the base of each spore, and surface tension snaps the spore away at astonishing speed, like a miniature catapult, launching it clear of the gills so wind can carry it onward.

One kingdom, many strategies

What is remarkable is that all these strategies solve the same problem in completely different ways. Wind, water, smell, sticky feet, animal guts, and tiny catapults are all just fungi finding clever routes to send their spores somewhere new, so their species can keep growing in fresh places for generations to come.