the.com/mushroom gill
Nature's bookshelf of spores, fanned out so death can read faster.
means The thin, blade-like ribs on the underside of a mushroom cap where spores are produced and released.
from "Gill" here has nothing to do with fish breathing — it comes from a separate old word (related to Scandinavian terms for a fold or crease, likely via dialectal English "gill" meaning a ravine or cleft) used for any thin, radiating fold or flap. English speakers borrowed that same word for fish breathing-slits and for these papery mushroom folds because both looked like rows of thin, parallel blades — a case of one word stretched across two very different kinds of nature by simple visual resemblance.
- surface area
- packs thousands of spores into a tiny cap
- spore drop
- print color on paper reveals species identity
- not universal
- some fungi use pores or teeth instead
- growth pattern
- radiate from stem like spokes on a wheel