So, welcome to my blog! It’s called hyphae. Which is the plural of hypha, and according to Wikipedia is:

a long, branching filamentous structure of a fungus, oomycete, or actinobacterium.

and also:

in most fungi are the main mode of vegetative growth, and are collectively called a mycelium.

 

Besides thinking fungi look extremely cool (see below), I like the fact that hyphae grow at their tips, kind of building on top of whatever is already there, elongating further.

Oyster mushroom (Pleurotus ostreatus) mycelium growing in a petri dish on coffee grounds
Oyster mushroom (Pleurotus ostreatus) mycelium growing in a petri dish on coffee grounds - By Tobi Kellner - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0

Moreover, the symbiotic association of fungi with some tress/plants, or mycorrhiza it’s something that blew my mind when I learned about it during undergrad. It allows not only the exchange of sugar compounds (or food for fungi) in return for minerals that plants need; it’s also a whole communications network1. Trees use it to signal stress to their neighbours2, including alerts if a predator is nearby (so they can prepare their defenses)3, and of course for transferring resources between them.

Those are enough reasons for hyphae to deserve -at least- a blog.

 

What to expect from this blog

I expect this blog will have almost none (in the best case, very little) of plant phisiology content, sorry for that.

Hyphae will host some of the things I’m doing on the sides of my life as a PhD-student-who-also-has-many-side-projects. These are probably the things I enjoy the most, and keep me surviving through the thesis process.

Some topics that may appear as I learn along the way:

  • open hardware, some small experiments and also some reflections,
  • wikidata & python experiments,
  • ideas on feminism, particularly in the “open” technology spaces,
  • ideas on community organizing, cooperativism and changing the world,
  • ideas on agroecological ways of producing food (related to item above),
  • posts in English and Spanish (as much as I can)

It is, of course, an ever-growing list.

Just like hyphae, these are work and ideas which grow at the tips, slowly, elongating a bit each time. They’re also exchanging material and information (in my head and now here), and at some point I expect them to connect to each other.

       

References

  1. Net transfer of carbon between ectomycorrhizal tree species in the field ↩

  2. Defoliation of interior Douglas-fir elicits carbon transfer and stress signalling to ponderosa pine neighbors through ectomycorrhizal networks ↩

  3. Interplant Communication of Tomato Plants through Underground Common Mycorrhizal Networks ↩