‘I have an understanding housemate’: the student who makes videos of fungus on faeces
Alfred Drummond-Herdman examines the gill of an inkcap mushroom under a microscope. Photograph: Emily Whitney/The GuardianView image in fullscreenAlfred Drummond-Herdman examines the gill of an inkcap mushroom under a microscope. I went online to identify them, and that was really the beginning of the rabbit hole that I have been going down ever since,” he says.View image in fullscreenAlfred Drummond-Herdman sets up a time-lapse to record fungi growing inside a terrarium in his Edinburgh bedroom.
- ▪Alfred Drummond-Herdman examines the gill of an inkcap mushroom under a microscope.
- ▪Photograph: Emily Whitney/The GuardianView image in fullscreenAlfred Drummond-Herdman examines the gill of an inkcap mushroom under a microscope.
- ▪I went online to identify them, and that was really the beginning of the rabbit hole that I have been going down ever since,” he says.View image in fullscreenAlfred Drummond-Herdman sets up a time-lapse to record fungi growing inside a terr
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| Original publisher | The Guardian — Science |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/aug/02/alfred-drummond-herdman-animal-dung-fungi-films-aoe |
| Publication time | Sun, 02 Aug 2026 08:00:15 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-02T08:10:40.508Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-02T08:10:40.508Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | YcOlSohUtAFy · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Alfred Drummond-Herdman examines the gill of an inkcap mushroom under a microscope. Photograph: Emily Whitney/The GuardianView image in fullscreenAlfred Drummond-Herdman examines the gill of an inkcap mushroom under a microscope. Photograph: Emily Whitney/The GuardianNature heroesFungi‘I have an understanding housemate’: the student who makes videos of fungus on faecesAlfred Drummond-Herdman’s extraordinary timelapses have been viewed by millions – and led him to identify new speciesThe age of extinction is supported byAbout this contentPatrick GreenfieldSun 2 Aug 2026 04.00 EDTSharePrefer the Guardian on GoogleAlfred Drummond-Herdman is possibly the only person in the UK who is sent animal faeces in the post out of goodwill.
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