![]() ![]() Picking gorillas as an example of the nonhuman casualties, the death of the last one is also hopeful, because after two centuries of gorilla hunting and trapping, there will be no more of these beautiful creatures to be shot. The death of the last human will mean the end of human anguish. In our unenviable position as witnesses of the collapse of the biosphere, grace can be sought in the certainty of the peaceful afterlife of the planet. Humans are on the fast track to extinction and the mess that we have made will take most of the larger animals with us. The same model applies to poroid mushrooms if we replace changes in gill spacing with modifications in tube size. (D) Goldilocks II: Optimal spore output is restored by a slight reduction in gill spacing so that the larger spores are shot to the midplane between gills. In this case, spores are launched short of the midplane because the distance between gills is unnecessarily large, and the efficiency of the fruit body decreases. (C) Ballistospory is maintained in other populations by an increase in gill spacing that limits the wastage of spores. This outcome is a potential feeder toward the loss of ballistospory in favor of dispersal by animals in gasteroid descendants from the population in (B). ![]() These developmental adjustments happen incrementally and reduce spore output as more and more spores hit the opposing gill. The larger spores produce larger Buller’s drops in this model and are shot further than the smaller spores. (B) Spore size begins to increase within a fungal population in response to an ecological opportunity for larger spores. (A) Goldilocks I: In the starting condition, optimal spore output is supported from fruit body whose spores are shot to the midplane between opposing gills. Goldilocks mushrooms in which the spore output is optimized to gill spacing are indicated by the level seesaws diagrammed in (A) and (D). In this diagram, a modification to the range of the spore discharge mechanism precedes an increase in gill spacing which is followed by a second adjustment to gill spacing that boosts spore output or escape from the fruit body. Caption: Hypothetical evolutionary seesaw that matches gill separation to the distance of ballistospore discharge. ![]()
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