"It's all gone wrong for me"1 - no, not the hungover cry of the ethanol-loving undergraduate, but the familiar wail of another lab cock up.
Mine, sometimes; yours, occasionally; and historic, from time to time.
1 Bill Bailey, 2001
Stressed Out
Jellyfish in a tube
We get a veg box delivered every fortnight, and with it always comes a small collection of recipes and slightly odd comments. In our last box, we got some mushrooms, and along with a recipe for 'Mushroom Tabbouleh Twist' was a discussion on their choice of plastic container for mushroom housing and how this kept them fresher. Somehow.
Fun guy Patrick loves growing mushrooms. "They're so mysterious. No one knows exactly what they want or need to grow. We know they don't take nitrogen from the compost, so what do they want?" To cap it off, there's little research into what makes a 'shroom tick.
It made me think of squid.
Essentially, squid are the mushrooms of the animal world. They're fussy. And one thing they don't like is tanks with corners. You put a load of baby squid in a cuboid tank and they will every jack one of them cop it. I have never heard why, but I guess they have some kind of stress response that, as squid, they can't learn to overcome and turn off. They probably kill themselves with stress hormone. Obviously, corners do not occur naturally in the open ocean, but I have to wonder how a species that fussy can survive.
Not very long ago I went to the Birmingham Sea Life Centre, where naturally I took hundreds and hundreds of photos of illuminated jelly fish in cylindrical tubes. The cylindrical tubes made me suppose they were like squid too - corners were life or death. How many of these disastrously unadaptive things are there out there? And what is it that makes mushrooms like certain soil or containers better? Do they have mushroom hormone responses?
