杏吧原创

Playing sounds to fungi seems to make them grow faster, which may allow researchers to speed up composting and habitat restoration.

杏吧原创s now know that healthy soils have a unique soundscape produced by invertebrates such as earthworms and ants, but they have not yet studied how this background noise in the ecosystem affects plant and fungal growth.

To investigate the impacts of sounds on fungi, at Flinders University in Australia and his colleagues buried green and rooibos teabags in soil inside a soundproof box. Inside the box, they played an 8 kilohertz tone at a volume of 70 decibels for one group of teabags and 90 decibels for another, 8 hours per day for 14 days. A control group received only ambient sound stimulation of less than 30 dB.

At the end of the experiment, both sets of composting tea bags exposed to sound had increased in weight, from 2.5 grams to 3.1 grams on average, due to the growth of fungi. The control tea bags stayed the same weight on average.

In a second experiment, the researchers played an 8 kHz tone at 80 dB to Petri dishes containing Trichoderma harzianum, a fungus that lives in soil and promotes plant growth.

After five days, the samples exposed to sound had an average of 2.5 million spore cells per millilitre of culture fluid, while the control samples had just over 540,000.

Robinson cautions that these are preliminary studies, and much more work is required to fully explain their observations. While the results may seem surprising, he says we can think of sound as an energy input which the fungi are somehow turning into growth. This may be via a so-called piezoelectric effect, in which mechanical pressure is converted into electrical energy.

He hopes the research leads to ways to restore habitats by broadcasting sounds. 鈥淲e now need to build on these findings and convert them into an applied use,鈥� Robinson says. 鈥淚f we can use these findings in ecosystem restoration and agriculture, then that would be great.鈥�

at the Botanic Gardens of Sydney says he can see how the energy of sound may stimulate the growth of fungal threads, known as hyphae.

鈥淚t would be interesting to see how applicable this would be across the whole of the fungal kingdom,鈥� Summerell says. 鈥淐learly, the energy in the sound waves is changing the local environment.鈥�

at the University of Southern Queensland, Australia, says from an ecosystem restoration perspective, this is pioneering work.

However, the mechanism by which sound is converted to growth is still unclear. 鈥淭he next step is to replicate these findings in the field where you have all these other factors confounding the laboratory results,鈥� Birnbaum says.