Fairy Circles & Being a Fun-gi
This is a fairy ring, or circle. There are several near where I live. There is all kinds of folklore regarding them from around the world. In Germany they are called Witches Circles and it was thought to make the places where witches danced on Walpurgisnacht (Walpurgis Night). The dutch believed they showed the places where the devil had set his milk churn, while to other europeans they were places where elves and fairies danced. Entering a fairy circle would allow you to see the fairies… but if you did, there was a high of being enthralled by their illusions. Fairies really love to dance, but really hate party crashers. Really violently hate. Most folklore paints them as dangerous places you really best stay out of. The fairies will either make you go mad, trap you inside the circle, or make you dance to death.
We now know that mushrooms are not all separate individual organisms. When a spore lands on the ground, it will spread out beneath it and wait until conditions are just right before the shrooms all pop up at points equidistant from the entire organism’s centre.
I hope I haven’t destroyed all the romance for people, but really fungi are just as much fun as creepy thumb-sized folk. They have the word fun in their name, for one thing. Also, the world’s largest living organism is thought to be a fungus. In the Malheur National Forest in Oregon is a honey fungus (Armillaria ostoyae) that covers an area of 3.4 square miles and may have a mass of 605 tons.
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