Hello I am jared. welcome to funscience demos. I have some friends with me today.
they are not plants. they are not animals, but they are alive, and they are one of
nature's best recyclers. welcome to the world of mushrooms, which are actually a type of fungus.
mushrooms are a type of fungus, and they come in many different shapes and sizes and colors. and
their favorite place to grow is in the forest, because that is where they do their job: recycle
nature. now, all mushrooms have basically the same parts, and some mushrooms might look pretty boring
when you just take a glance at them, but when you start to explore mushrooms, you see some of their
parts are really beautiful and interesting. and today we are going to do a mushroom dissection
to take a look at some of these different parts. now if you wanted to find your own mushrooms so
that you can explore them on your own, you can find some at the store, and those would be safe to eat.
you can also find them in the woods and those are things you definitely do not want to eat. to
do a mushroom dissection, we could actually use our hands and fingers, we could use a scissors,
or we could even use a plastic knife. now, when i went to the store to buy these mushrooms, i found
whole mushrooms, and then i actually found these bigger mushrooms with just the cap where you can
clearly see this part of the mushroom called the gills. now, when you look at a whole mushroom you
get from the store, you are actually looking at the fruit of the fungus. this is the part that helps
the fungus reproduce. there is actually a whole lot more to this fungus under the ground. it is called
the mycelium, and that mycelium is the part of the fungus that does all the recycling of nature,
all those insects and dead wood. so let us start dissecting this mushroom. now, you will notice on this
mushroom, i ca not see these beautiful gills like i can on this one, but that is because they are hidden
with this veil that is covering them. so i like to start by pulling off the stalk, and the nice
thing about mushrooms is the stalk comes off relatively easily just by bending and pushing.
you can see the stalk popped right off. now, we have zoomed in so you can see this better,
but with the stalk popped off, i can pull back the veil, and now i can see these beautiful gills
on the mushroom, and now i want to just gently start pulling back that veil. i can use my fingers
and you can see it just pops off, or i could come in with the scissors and clip some of that off.
you can actually see these delicate folds and flaps of all these tiny gills,
and you can notice those gills look a lot like these gills on the bigger mushroom,
and even different types of mushrooms also have gills. the gills might look
a little bit different, but i can still see them if you look carefully.
another thing i can do if i want to dissect the mushroom, is actually cut it in half, and
to do that i am going to use a scissors. i am just going to hold up my mushroom and carefully snip,
and then take a look at how the mushroom looks. we will zoom in and take a closer look. it is a
lot easier to see the different parts of the mushroom when i cut it in half. i can see the stalk,
i can see the cap, if i look carefully i can see the side of the gills, and actually a little veil
covering the gills. the nice thing about mushroom dissections is that it works just as well with
my hands. you can see how cleanly and easily that broke, and it has still got a nice view
of the gills, so the next question is, what are those gills for? what is the purpose of these
gills? these gills actually hold millions of tiny, tiny spores, and those spores
help that fungus reproduce. and just like mushrooms come in different colors, spores also come in
many different colors. now, this is a different type of mushroom, and we picked this one because it has
lots of spores, and those spores are ready to come off, and it is very easy to see,
so check this out. i am going to puff on this mushroom, and we will hopefully see the spores
go airborne. we have zoomed in so you could see the spores, watch carefully. here we go.
if you saw something that actually looked like a puff of smoke, that was actually the spores.
let us take a second look at that. watch carefully. here we go.
as i rake my finger over the top of that mushroom you can even see the spores puff up with every tap.
now to take a closer look at those spores, we need to get creative
and that is what we are going to do on our next video, take a look at this.
look at these intricate patterns. those patterns are made by spores from mushrooms, and we are going
to show you how to make them. not only are we going to look at the cool designs and patterns in these
different spore prints, we are going to show you how you can turn them into a cool project. dissecting
mushrooms is a great and easy way to get started exploring the world of mushrooms and fungus, one of
nature's best recyclers. if you want to learn more about fungus and life cycles, check out our channel
funsciencedemos. science is so cool. sometimes it smells a little funny. thanks for watching