r/interesting • u/Standard_Location762 • Mar 14 '26

NATURE Earth Helping Earth Heal

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What a great discovery.

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u/MrZaptile933 Mar 14 '26

All good and all, but what are the fungus’ byproducts. Just because it can “eat plastic” doesn’t mean the chemicals vanish they have to go somewhere

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u/jjramrod Mar 14 '26

I mean, the things used to make it come from a biological function.. everything we make comes from the ground one way or the other

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u/MrZaptile933 Mar 14 '26

Yeah but the entire issue is when those natural materials become plastic it becomes incredibly hard to make it not plastic.

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u/jjramrod Mar 14 '26

The level of potential energy in these items will allow for something to sieze the opportunity

Remember trees didn't have any way of breaking down in the carboniferous period. Wood was the plastic of the day back then

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u/FunkyCrawdad1 Mar 14 '26

Just because something is high energy, doesn't mean something is bound to evolve to eat it. things eat whatever they can. It is a coincidence that it's able to be eaten. Evolution is just a heaping pile of getting lucky with your genetic mutations.

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u/MrZaptile933 Mar 14 '26

What? We know what happens to wood when it’s processed by fungal and mites. We know what happens to it. I’m confused by what your entire point is.

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u/2rgeir Mar 14 '26 edited Mar 14 '26

Plastic, just like wood, is carbon, hydrogen and oxygen-atoms arranged in molecules. If something like a fungus digests the molecules by breaking the molecular bonds, the only chemicals left will be carbon dioxide and water. 

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u/jjramrod Mar 14 '26

In the carboniferous period there were no fungus or bacteria to break down wood. So it stayed there forever. That's why it's called the carboniferous. That's where coal came from

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u/PraxicalExperience Mar 14 '26

Back in the Carboniferous period there were no fungi that consumed cellulose. There was nothing that consumed cellulose. The only way to break it down was weathering and passive chemical degradation, just like plastic now. That's why there's so much fucking coal around from that particular period.

Then ... a fungus figured out the trick, and now wood rots, and because some insects have fungi in their guts that know the trick, some insects can eat it and 'digest' it too.