Fragments From Floyd: E pluribus unum

The even overcast lighting was good when I happened on these grape-sized puffballs, but I sure wished for another set of hands--someone to drop a twig on them so I could stay focused on their little round "mouths" as the spores came belching forth in a dusky cloud.

I tried shaking the small tree above them hoping to bring some water drops down and then quickly get back in place to snap the dust of a hundred thousand spores ejected by the force of that one kersplat of water on these sacks of future fungi.

The giant puffball, the big brother of these little puffers, produces 20 trillion spores. I've seen them almost two feet across, spongy white inside like french bread, but in fact, nothing but spores. If each of these tiny motes of fungal future successfully produced another of the same size, somewhere I read it would be enough to cover the surface of the Earth with giant puffballs; or would equal the volume or weight of the Earth--some such believe-it-or-not factoid.

Point is, this kind of reproductive success never happens. It takes that kind of outrageous over-production just to break even, in somewhat the same way that, for the 20 million sperm that compete for the sole ovum, only the lucky one is chosen to produce the single human that will result. For the rest, they do their part, statistically, with the odds up front stacked against any single spore, or sperm. And because of this sacrifice of the many, the few go on, and also through them, the species.