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anybody ever seen anything like this???!!!!!


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my friend has had this thing for like twenty years and it's just growing bigger an bigger, this is my friend in the pictures for size.  

he says that when he got it that i probably weighed like twenty pounds, and now probably weighs sixty pounds depending how much water it has absorbed.  

he said that he has never seen it produce spores.  it has a very tough outer shell on the top and sides, but the bottom does not have that hard shell, and their is soft white stuff on the bottom that is probably where it absorbs food.  the bottom is covered in like decaying grass and twigs that are kind of stuck on it, i'm guessing that is the food that it eats.  

he gave me a small sample of the white stuff from the bottom, and i put it in some water and it absorbed so much water that it expanded greatly in size and turned clear, like clear jelly.  

again, it does not seem to ever produce or release any kind of spores, it is at least twenty years old, and it survives heat and cold:  hot summers and cold winters do not seem to affect it.   

so far, no one has seen anything like it before....  wondering if we have a new species here or something?  

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received a sample of the white stuff, but it was dried out by the time he gave it to me, and this is how small it was, but then i started hydrating it with water, and it got so much bigger!  

 

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i also put some on a microslide and stained it with some green food coloring:  

 

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*microscope slide 

and the microscope was a pocket microscope, probably around 40x power  

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Mushroom fruiting bodies usually have limited life span and either dry out or disintegrate after that. 20 years make me suspicious. May be it is something man made. Some kind of chemical compound, polymer, which can absorb moisture.

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13 hours ago, vitog said:

Is this the first time that it has been lifted off the ground?

no, he has lifted it off the ground before:  he has taken it camping with him even lol.  sometimes he leaves it sitting in on the ground for months though.  it seems to slowly eat decaying plant matter over the years.  but it doesn't seem to release spores or anything.  

7 hours ago, svs said:

Mushroom fruiting bodies usually have limited life span and either dry out or disintegrate after that. 20 years make me suspicious. May be it is something man made. Some kind of chemical compound, polymer, which can absorb moisture.

hi svs!  this thing has stumped everyone!  lol.  but it is definitely biological.  i've looked at some samples from the underneath of it under a scope, sometimes can definitely see organic biological looking features.  and it is steadily growing over the years.  

most people think it is some kind of fungus, but it may be a fungus other than a mushroom.  it doesn't have a stalk like a mushroom, nor does it have mycelium.  

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The pics of the white stuff and how it rehydrates looks exactly like a hydrogel polymer called Stockosorb. It is a synthetic soil amendment product designed to help water retention in dry soils or during drought.

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