While nature is obviously glorious to behold in real time, when somebody time-lapses its growing lifeforms, things get surreal real quick. That’s true whether you’re talking about blooming flowers, thundering storms, or even developing frog embryos. Now, we can add to the list of stunning nature time-lapses the video below. Which shows grey oyster mushrooms growing over the course of 13 days in just 90 seconds.
The YouTube channel Boxlapse recently posted the shroom-lapse, noting that the featured grey oysters spring forth from a grow kit. Grow kits, for those without a green thumb—or fungus-y finger—are simple, all-in-one kits that allow people to easily grow plants. Or, in this case, fungi.
At the beginning of the video, Boxlapse cuts open the kit in an “X” pattern. The YouTuber then gives the kit’s soil a couple of H2O spritzes, and the mushrooms are off to the races.
Boxlapse
For the first 40 seconds (or 8 days) of the video, not much happens; there’s clearly something going on in the kit’s soil, but there’s no visual sign of any growth. Then, right around what would be day 9—bang! The mushrooms bloom like pale, striated, zombie flowers. And watching them seemingly stretch out into our 3D dimensional universe from the great beyond is indeed trippy AF.
Those now looking for another quick fix of nature time-lapses, don’t worry, we have you covered. Not just for more time-lapses of stuff like water-deprived organisms here on terra firma either. NASA, for example, created a time-lapse of the Sun changing over the course of ten years, boiling down the decade of flame and fury to a single hour. Although there are a lot more great time-lapses from Boxlapse too. Such as the one below of baby eggplants growing from dead flower stems like bulbs of blown, purple glass.