What is the biggest Living Thing on our Planet RIGHT NOW?
How about…
A Fungus the Size of
an Entire Airport
Picture a fungus. Maybe
you have some growing in your basement.
Awww, it's so cute!
Now picture Central Park in New York.
Awww, it's so cute!
Now imagine a single fungus as big as
three Central Parks.
It totally exists.
Now, this is somewhat difficult to wrap your head around, since we typically think of a living thing as being a single thing.
Let me explain.
When you see mushrooms, you're not seeing the whole organism. The fungus spreads underground, sending out roots that grow up into mushrooms here and there.
So, scientists discovered that honey mushrooms growing in a forest in eastern Oregon were genetically identical. Once they began probing around they discovered that the roots of the fungus was spread over an area
covering 2,200 acres,
or about 3.5 square miles.
It's ONE SINGLE Living Thing,
but it'd take you more than half an hour to walk from one end of it to the other.
That's enough to cover most of this section of New York City.
And that's actually not
the strangest thing about it.
The fungus is believed to be about 2,400-years old. Yep. It has outlasted the Romans and was even hanging around before Jesus' time.
Though there may be one life form more impressive than that:
The Pando Tree Grove
All one tree.
It's one tree, sprouting out multiple trunks all connected by the same mass of roots. But it covers 107 acres and fills an astonishing 6,615 tons of mass.
That's the equivalent of 33 blue whales,
or 76,492 adult human men.
Oh, and it's thought to be 80,000-years old. Entire species came into existence and died off in this thing's lifespan.
Mankind's entire rise and fall as an advanced civilization is a blink in Pando's eye.
Those are the two LARGEST living things on earth, and most people don’t even know about them.
Sources:
Wikipedia.com
Wikimedia Commons
Cracked.com
Photos.com