Truffles are underground fruiting bodies, i.e. reproductive structures, of fungi that live in a symbiotic relationship with trees. They have been described as underground mushrooms. They produce spores, but unlike mushrooms and toadstools they cannot release them into the air in order to be dispersed to a new location, where they can grow. Therefore, truffles depend on animals to disperse their spores which also turns out to be essential for the health of forest, since the fungi form mycorrhizas, which live in tree roots and help supply the trees with nutrients in return for sugars from the tree.
Previously, only mammals were known to hunt for truffles, and people have used dogs and pigs to search for truffles to use in cooking. Scientists in South America have found two species of birds, chucao tapaculos and black-throated huet-huets, that actively search out truffles, eat them and disperse spores in the droppings.
Matthew Smith of University of Florida, one of the researchers, commented: “Some truffles that the birds eat are brightly coloured and resemble local berries. Our future research may look to see if there is an evolutionary adaptation there — that the truffles have evolved to look more like the berries that the birds also eat”.
Reference and Link: SciTech Daily 28 October 2021, Current Biology 28 October 2021, doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2021.10.024.
Editorial Comment: This is another misuse of the word adaptation by the evolutionists. Adaptation is the ability to cope with changes in the environment. It will not produce any new features for the plant even though it can produce variations to structures and functions it may already have. How do the evolutionists think underground truffles evolved colour and berry-like shapes resembling above ground berries? If truffle-forming fungi did not already have bright colours or berry shapes, then just being ignored by birds will never give these features to truffles. Instead, the truffles would die out and lose in the evolutionary struggle for life.
How could the fungi even know that the birds like to eat them, or that birds could even look for them underground? None of the organisms in this system – trees, fungi and birds, could give each creature the right structures and functions needed to make the system work. There are three species involved in this ecological process, and the evolutionists have given the credit to the simplest, most mindless creature in the mix – the fungi. But then that’s evolution, isn’t it?
In reality it takes someone outside a multi-part system to make the components and get them to work together as a functioning system. Therefore, let us give the credit to the Creator Christ who made the birds, the trees and the fungi as well as put them together in a functioning ecosystem for the mutual benefit of all.
Creation Research News 17 November 2021
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