Fungi seem to communicate with each other, using up to 50 "words"

Amazing stuff! Very exciting! Do we need fungi language translators soon? 😄

"We know plants communicate with each other, sending chemical signals under the soil. ... A new study is now suggesting that fungi can ‘talk’ to each other in a language similar to that of humans, recognizing 50 words. ...
Fungi are neither plant nor animal and belong to their own kingdom, which includes yeasts, molds, and mushrooms. There are about 144,000 known species of organisms in the kingdom Fungi. They are everywhere in large numbers – in the soil, the air, lakes, rivers, seas, on and within plants and animals, in food and clothing, and in the human body."

From the abstract:

"Fungi exhibit oscillations of extracellular electrical potential recorded via differential electrodes inserted into a substrate colonized by mycelium or directly into sporocarps. We analysed electrical activity of ghost fungi (Omphalotus nidiformis), Enoki fungi (Flammulina velutipes), split gill fungi (Schizophyllum commune) and caterpillar fungi (Cordyceps militaris). The spiking characteristics are species specific: a spike duration varies from 1 to 21 h and an amplitude from 0.03 to 2.1 mV. We found that spikes are often clustered into trains. Assuming that spikes of electrical activity are used by fungi to communicate and process information in mycelium networks, we group spikes into words and provide a linguistic and information complexity analysis of the fungal spiking activity. We demonstrate that distributions of fungal word lengths match that of human languages. [Should this be not in reverse as human world lengths matches that of fungi?] We also construct algorithmic and Liz-Zempel complexity hierarchies of fungal sentences and show that species S. commune generate the most complex sentences."

Fungi seem to communicate with each other, using up to 50 "words"

Language of fungi derived from their electrical spiking activity (open access)