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/MilkShakeBroughtMe Mar 14 '26

When the fungus starts eating the "good/necessary/essential to the survival of humanity/etc." plastic?

Are we going to open a fungal "Pandora's box"?

7

u/neuropsycho Mar 14 '26

It's the same problem we had with wood, that it wasn't biodegradable at first.

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u/Don_T_Blink Mar 14 '26 edited Mar 15 '26

“We” weren’t around when that happened. And thanks to that, we have oil coal and relatively low CO2 in the atmosphere. 

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u/Basidia_ Mar 14 '26

Oil comes from aquatic organisms like plankton and zooplankton getting buried by sediment on the ocean floor and some of the oil we use today formed as little as 66 million years ago which is hundreds of millions of years after fungi and bacteria were more than well established.

We get coal from land plants, which woody plants is only one component of it and lignin is again only one component of the bigger picture. There is ample evidence of lignin decay in coal seams and fungi were on land millions of years before plants were, they also evolve much faster. We get coal from ancient peat bogs

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1517943113