Question: Without sounding pervy, how do bodysnatching flower fungus have sex with itself?

Louise Johnson answered on 21 Jun 2010:

The fungus I’m talking about is called “anther smut” and it is a disease that certain kinds of flowers, including carnations, get.

The fungus takes over the plant, and instead of yellow pollen, the plant starts to make purple fungus spores. When bees come to the flower, instead of spreading pollen to help the plants mate, they spread disease from plant to plant.

Fungi reproduce in several different ways – sometimes they just make identical clones of themselves, and sometimes they make special sex cells (like how humans make eggs or sperm) and mate with each other.

Anther smut does something weirder than that, which is that a fungus will make two sex cells and then mate them *together* even though they come from the same parent. So some kind of sex is happening, but only one parent is involved!

The posh name for this is “automixis”.