A new study by scientists reveal that mushrooms and other types of fungi are able to create their own weather conditions to spread their spores instead of passively releasing their spores into the world.

At the annual meeting of American Physical Society's Division of Fluid Dynamics Emilie Dressaire, a professor of experimental fluid mechanics at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and Marcus Roper of the University of California released their finding about mushrooms to the assembled scientists and to Live Science. Their research shows that mushrooms are able to create weather patterns by creating their own wind to spread spores instead of relying on existing weather to spread the species.

This discovery was made when Dressaire and Roper took high speed footage of common, commercially Oyster and Shiitake mushrooms. The evidence showed that the mushrooms allowed their moisture to evaporate off of them instead of being absorbed by the mushrooms. This evaporation cools down the mushrooms, allowing for cold air pockets to form around the mushrooms. Cold air is denser than warm air, and flows and spreads out. This, combined with the water vapor forms by evaporation (which is less dense than air and raises) allows the spores of the mushrooms to spread out far more than if they were passively released. Thus, mushrooms create their own wind and weather patterns to spread out.

This news explains why mushrooms, which traditionally grow in dark and confined places, are able to spread out to different areas. After all, there are less than favorable wind conditions underneath a log to spread spores, and this technique helps spores reach new areas much better than passive spreading techniques.

Dressaire and Roper managed to make a visual model of this effect through the use of their high speed footage along with lasers and graphs of temperature and water loss to demonstrate the whole process. Roper believes that their research can be used to prove that most, if not all, types of mushrooms create their own wind to spread their spores around the environment, however further study is needed.

Some other studies have shown other ways mushrooms can deliver spores, such as one done by Anne Pringle, a mycologist at Harvard University. She found that some types of mushrooms spread their spores through the use of shooting them out at a high velocity in rapid succession.

In any case, it looks as though Mushrooms are not quite as passive as they look.