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Research at Miami University on how fungal spores travel in order to survive received national attention at the beginning of the year. Now the video of the research has won an award in an international competition by ChloroFilms, a project designed to encourage creative ways to learn about plant biology.
Hayley Kilroy, a botany major who graduated from Miami in May, is among the competition’s second place winners for "The Fastest Flights in Nature: A Fungal Opera." The video shows a montage of the fungus's amazing launches, which have the fastest recorded acceleration in nature, set to Verdi's “Anvil Chorus.” The video is designed to artistically showcase the abilities of fungi, which are much less studied than plants and animals.
The video took place in Miami botany professor Nicholas Money’s lab with high-speed cameras running at up to 250,000 frames per second to capture the blisteringly fast movements. The research was published in the January 2009 and September 2008 issues of Public Library of Science ONE and was funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.
Kilroy set the movements to music and a fungal opera was born.
ChloroFilms is a nonprofit project with grant support from the American Society of Plant Biologists, the Botanical Society of America and the Canadian Botanical Association. The objective is to promote the creation of fresh, attention-getting and informative video content about plant life. To view all winners, visit http://www.chlorofilms.org/indes.php?module=Pages&func=display&pageid+13.
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