Mushrooms that glow?

If you haven’t heard yet, glowing mushrooms do exist. When they first appeared is unknown, but we do know that no one questioned it enough to write about it until Aristotle came along. Of course, being a philosopher, he had to ask why some mushrooms glow. He may have been denied the answer during his lifetime, but now, we think we have one.

Jay Dunlap, a geneticist and molecular scientist at Dartmouth College, worked with a group of colleagues to spread fake fungi throughout a forest in Brazil. They created the mushrooms out of acrylic resin and inserted green led lights in some of them to imitate the naturally-cast bioluminescence of Neonothopanus gardneri. Lastly, they coated the imposters with a sticky substance.

By doing this, they hoped to see whether or not light affected the number of insects that visit the organism while also eliminating the variable of smell. As it turned out, much more insects were found stuck to the lit up mushrooms than the dark ones, proving their hypothesis. Why was this so significant?
In dense forests where wind is uncommon, mushrooms rely on insects to spread their spores. This gives a reason for the mushroom to glow. If you were a mushroom and the only way to continue your species existence was to attract more insects, it only makes sense that you would do everything you could to do that, including lighting up at night.