He found the light attracted the sort of insects and other creatures that would be good at spreading spores. Cassius Stevani at the São Paulo University in Brazil and colleagues showed this by scattering plastic mushrooms on the forest floor fitted with green LED lights that matched the eerie bioluminescence of Neonothopanus gardneri, a splendid mushroom that grows at the base of palm trees. The ghostly glow appeared in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn when Tom Sawyer used it to light up a tunnelīut the best explanation seems to be that the night-light attracts insects and other animals to the fruiting bodies of fungi, who then spread the spores far and wide. Many fungi and mushrooms are now known to glow in the dark, and explanations for why they do it range from it being a useless by-product of metabolism to a sophisticated anti-predator adaptation. Naturalists in the early 19th century identified fungal growth as the source of the glow from wooden support beams used to shore up mines. The ghostly glow later became known as “ foxfire”, probably from the Old French word fois meaning “false”, and the phenomenon appeared in many works of literature, including The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn when Tom Sawyer used it to light up a tunnel. Aristotle in 382BC and the Roman scholar Pliny the Elder writing three centuries later both observed the effect of fungal bioluminescence when they described the glowing light of the cold “fire” of damp wood.
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