World's Largest Organism - Humongous Mushroom

Very strange!

clipped from www.sciam.com The blue whale is big, but nowhere near as huge as a sprawling fungus in eastern Oregon HIDDEN GIANT:  A small outcropping of honey mushrooms on the surface hide the largest known organism on Earth, a fungus infesting the woods of eastern Oregon. occupies some 2,384 acres (965 hectares) of soil in Oregon's Blue Mountains. Put another way, this humongous fungus would encompass 1,665 football fields, or nearly four square miles (10 square kilometers) of turf. he fungus is estimated to be 2,400 years old but could be as ancient as 8,650 years, The team paired fungal samples in petri dishes to see if they fused (see photo below), a sign that they were from the same genetic individual, and used DNA fingerprinting to determine where one individual fungus ended. A. ostoyae, causes Armillaria root disease, which kills swaths of conifers in many parts of the U.S. and Canada An Armillaria individual consists of a network of hyphae