mycelium growth drawing — alexandra emberley

Mycelium Drawing Study, 2026

Mycelium draws 143 hyphae of the fungus Podospora anserina, each traced from a laboratory time-lapse of a single thallus growing on agar. Every line is a real filament: its shape is the path the hypha took across the plate, and its weight is the speed at which it grew.

The recording, made by Éric Herbert and colleagues at Université Paris Cité, shows a 25 mm field photographed every twenty minutes for 27 hours, from one germinating spore to a network of several thousand branches. I separated the film into frames, isolated the filaments from the agar, thinned them to one-pixel skeletons, and traced the network of the twentieth hour into 932 ordered paths, one per hypha. Beyond that hour the network is too dense to separate.

An earlier version of this animation, made when I first began working with code, had the same structure but drew curves built from sines. This version keeps the structure and replaces the invention with data. Each iteration takes thirteen hyphae, removes them from the network, and scatters them across the page; twelve are drawn together over fifteen seconds, from base to tip, and the thirteenth arrives late. Finished iterations stay. The line weight follows each hypha's measured growth rate, the fastest heaviest, as in a living fungus, where the leading hyphae are wide and the lateral branches fine.

Colophon

Source recording: Éric Herbert, Growth of Podospora anserina fungal network, figshare, 2019, https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.9897056, CC BY 4.0. Made for Dikec et al., Scientific Reports 10, 3131 (2020).

Extraction, tracing, and animation in Python (NumPy, SciPy, scikit-image, OpenCV, Matplotlib); encoded with FFmpeg.