Mushroom Gills: An Engineering Marvel (David LaBre Allen)

Ohio-based researchers Nicholas P. Money and Mark Fischer have studied the shape of mushroom caps in an effort to understand how close to a perfect shape actual mushrooms are able to achieve. The role of a mushroom cap is to support a spore-bearing hymenium.

In the case of your regular garden variety mushroom the hymenium exists on the gills that develop under the cap. Mushrooms are know to have a remarkable ability to align their caps so the gills are optimally aligned with the Earth’s gravitational field, giving their forcibly ejected spores the best chance of finding their way into passing air currents for dispersal.

As it turns out, no mushroom is “perfect” but they can do pretty well. Money and Fischer looked at the actual gill arrangements of more than 30 agarics in their study as well as investigated various arrangement through modeling.

A review of the research appears in the BBC article Secret of mushroom shape revealed by Jody Bourton:

Prof Money and Dr Mark Fischer from the College of St Joseph, Cincinnati, also in Ohio, US used theoretical modelling, measurements and photographs to investigate the optimal gill structure for a mushroom. “We set out to design the perfect mushroom,” Prof Money says. In nature, gilled mushrooms have gills arranged so that they fork and branch off. By having this arrangement relative to a flat surface the mushrooms are able to increase their surface area 20-fold and increase their spore dispersal, the researchers say.

The original article has been accepted or publication in Mycological Research and was published on-line on October 31, 2009. See Why mushrooms form gills: efficiency of the lamellate morphology, Mark W.F. Fischer and Nicholas P. Money.