Introducing the Fairy Inkcap Mushroom…

Now, these mushrooms are cool for two very specific reasons:

1. They rarely last more than a day or two (the last image above shows these mushrooms just 12 hours after the other photos were taken)

2. They have 143 different sexes!

Yep, you read that right… 143 sexes.

And that’s a low figure in the fungi world – with one species, Schizophyllum commune, having over 23,000!

In a paper published in Nature, an expert on the topic of multi-sex species notes that “frequency of sexual reproduction is a key parameter to explain how many sexes a species has.” In other words, the more a species likes to get it on, the more sexes it is going to have. And that makes sense – when your species only has two sexes, you can only successfully reproduce with half the population; if there’s three sexes, you can mate with two-thirds of the population; and if there’s 143 sexes, then 99.3% of the population is fair game (from a reproductive perspective).

Naturally, fungi don’t have the same issues with identity politics that we humans do, because they’re better than us in pretty much every way. They simply resolve any problems through gigantic, all-inclusive orgies – after all, what would you do if you only had 48 hours to live?

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Fairy Inkcap Mushrooms (Coprinellus disseminatus), Reserva Nacional Pacaya Samiria, Peru