Cock's Spur on Rye

What you are looking at is an ear of rye grass, and the creepy looking rotten banana thing on it is an ergot. The French think it looks like a rooster's spur, and so the title Cock's Spur on Rye. The ergot is a fungal parasite, and replaces a grain of rye. The fungus is called Calviceps purpurea. Until the 1850s, it was assumed that the ergot parasite was part of the rye plant.

Ingestion of ergot causes a condition known as ergotism. In Medieval, and probably ancient times, it was known as the Holy Fire, or St. Anthony's Fire, due to the symptoms of convulsions and painful burning in the extremities. The symptoms were caused by a variety of mycotoxins - toxic alkaloids that the fungus produced. Along with the pain, the toxins produced ghastly hallucinations in practically any animal that ingested it. There are two kinds of poisoning: gangrenous ergotism, in which blood is cut off to the extremities due to constriction of the arteries and capillaries.

Convulsive ergotism is characterized by nervous dysfunction, where the victim is twisting and contorting, trembling, shaking, and experiences wryneck, a more of less fixed twisting of the neck, which seem ot further stimulate convulsions and fits.

Modern pharmaceuticals have been derived from these poisons, including one much abused substance derived from the compound of ergotamine - LSD.

But that's not what I want to talk about. The really creepy thing about this fungus is its lifestyle - how it propagates. I mentioned that it is a parasite, and parasitism in Nature is so pervasive that - if you happen to believe in Intelligent Design - you'd be hard-pressed not to be convinced that the Almighty loves parasites.

The ergot is the nonsexual over-wintering form of the fungus. In the spring, it sprouts stroma, the sexual forms, like little mushrooms, that release the spores. The spores have evolved over time to exactly imitate the pollen of the rye flowers. Once a spore settles down on a rye flower, it destroys and replaces the ovum of the flower, and sends out insidious tendrils into the plant that take over the feeding tubes that would nourish the seeds. Once established, it can also produce a secondary infestation of the ear of rye, by producing honeydew, a sticky, sweet amber liquid that contains asexual clone spores. The honeydew is picked up by insects, which spreads the parasite further.

All in all, just some really, truly, deeply creepy behavior.

Why bring this up? The New York Times recently had an article about the Singularity, found here. They've presented a rather optimistic view of what all will happen, once the Singularity begins, the human age ends, and all bets are off.

I've mentioned in a prior essay that I'm sure we can predict what these superhuman machines, or machine/human hybrids, or who-knows-what will do, because they will now be alive, and likely to repeat all or most of the behaviors of living things.

Well, there you go. This is one behavior. I can find a lot more examples. But I guess you could say I'm lately leaning towards a dystopian view.

Tra-la-la!