54 Fun Facts About Fungi

Which substance in their cell walls sets fungi apart from plants, bacteria and most protists?

Chitin is made by fungi but not by human cells, so drugs that block its production, such as nikkomycin Z, are studied as antifungals.

Genetically, fungi are more closely related to which group than to plants?

Animals, including humans, share so much cell machinery with fungi that many antifungal drugs also harm our own cells.

What is the scientific study of fungi called?

Mycology still shows its botanical past: fungi are named under the International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants.

What nickname is popularly given to the underground fungal networks that link plants together?

The Wood Wide Web is a catchy image, but a 2023 review warned that popular claims of trees sharing food and warnings through it outrun the field evidence.

The Latin word fungus is thought to be related to a Greek word meaning what?

Sponge: Latin fungus and Greek sphongos were probably both borrowed, independently, from an older non-Indo-European word.

What are the thread-like filaments that make up the body of most fungi called?

Hyphae can be formidable: the rice blast fungus inflates a special cell to about 80 times atmospheric pressure to punch into rice leaves.

What is the interconnected network of fungal filaments called?

Mycelium can be grown on farm waste into moulded packaging, a biodegradable alternative to polystyrene foam.

How do fungi obtain their food?

Secreting enzymes, then absorbing the results, means fungi digest food outside their bodies, and with termites they are the main decomposers of dead trees.

Which video game series imagines a zombie-like outbreak caused by a mutated Cordyceps fungus?

The Last of Us stretches the truth: real Cordyceps fungi are parasites, but of insects and other arthropods, not people.

The largest fungal phylum, the Ascomycota, is commonly known by what name?

Sac fungi are named for the ascus, the microscopic sac where their sexual spores form; ascus comes from the Greek for a leather wine-skin.

Which compound from 'magic mushrooms' has been trialled as a treatment for depression?

Psilocybin crossed into medicine in Australia, where from July 2023 authorised psychiatrists could prescribe it for treatment-resistant depression.

Why are water moulds, once classed as fungi, now placed outside the fungal kingdom?

Their walls are made of cellulose, and DNA shows water moulds evolved separately from true fungi, which they only resemble.

What organism was Ötzi the Iceman carrying that may have served as tinder or medicine?

Two kinds of bracket fungus were with him, and the birch polypore has anti-parasite properties, fitting the whipworm infestation found in his gut.

Which 1840s catastrophe was triggered by a water mould once mistaken for a fungus?

The Irish Potato Famine pathogen is hard to breed against: most potato resistance genes work only against some of its strains, and one strain beat a gene before breeders even used it.

Lacking xylem or phloem, how do fungi like Armillaria move water long distances?

They form root-like cords called rhizomorphs, which let Armillaria reach through the soil from one tree to infect the next.

What in Oregon's Malheur National Forest is often called the largest living organism on Earth?

A honey fungus colony there kills the conifers whose roots it invades, and it is thought to be thousands of years old.

Yeasts reproduce mainly by which method?

Budding leaves a scar on the mother cell each time, and a mother cell can produce only a limited number of daughters before it dies.

Which yeast species raises most bread and ferments ale and wine?

Saccharomyces cerevisiae makes bread rise because the carbon dioxide it releases forms gas pockets that expand the dough.

Which microbiologist's 1850s research showed that fermentation is caused by living microbes?

Louis Pasteur also found a twist: give yeast oxygen and it ferments less, not more, an observation now called the Pasteur effect.

Which ancient civilisation's ruins hold 4,000-year-old evidence of yeast-raised bread and brewing?

Egypt's bakers and brewers left the evidence, and in 2019 scientists went further, isolating live yeast from ancient beer and mead jars dug up in Israel.

Which mould is added to give Stilton and Danish Blue their blue veins?

Penicillium roqueforti works both sides: the mould that ripens blue cheese can also spoil bread and chilled foods.

Who noticed in September 1928 that a mould contaminating a Staphylococcus culture had killed it?

He coined the word penicillin the following March, to avoid repeating the phrase 'mould broth filtrate'.

Which two scientists shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in medicine for developing an antibiotic into a usable drug?

Florey and Chain's drug was hard to make in wartime Britain, so in 1941 Florey sought help in the US, where labs and firms worked out how to mass-produce it.

Which fungal product is used to stop transplant patients rejecting new organs?

Ciclosporin blocks calcineurin, an enzyme T cells rely on to send out inflammatory signals, so the immune attack on a new organ is damped.

Which banana replaced the Gros Michel after a soil fungus wiped out its plantations?

Cavendish bananas resisted that strain, but a newer one, Tropical Race 4, now threatens the Cavendish too.

Ergot fungus growing on rye caused which historical epidemic disease?

St Anthony's Fire is said to be named after the saint: sufferers sought his intercession, and monks of an order in his name cared for them.

Aflatoxins, among the most carcinogenic natural substances, are produced by which moulds?

Aspergillus species were unmasked after a mystery disease killed more than 100,000 young poultry in England in 1960; the birds had eaten mouldy peanut meal.

Which mushroom causes the majority of the world's fatal mushroom poisonings?

The death cap has spread far beyond its native Europe, and in North America it has taken up with new host trees.

Which discovery in genetics was made using the bread mould Neurospora crassa?

The one gene, one enzyme idea came from mutant strains of the mould that each could not make one nutrient and grew only when that single nutrient was added.

Which fungal disease has killed millions of hibernating bats in North America?

White-nose syndrome makes bats wake too often during hibernation, so they burn through their fat and starve before spring.

Lichens are partnerships between a fungus and what?

An alga or a cyanobacterium makes the lichen's food by photosynthesis, so lichens can colonise bare rock as pioneers.

Which so-called moss, common in boreal forests, is really a lichen?

Reindeer moss is a key winter food for caribou, and several traditional cultures have also used it as a medicine.

What happened to two lichen species ESA exposed to open space in 2005?

They came back unharmed, and lichens have since survived further space tests designed to probe whether life could ride between planets on rocks.

What can scientists date by measuring slow-growing lichen patches on exposed rock?

Glacier retreats leave bare rock, and because crust lichens spread over it at a slow, measurable rate, patch size shows how long the rock has been exposed.

Which fungal disease has been linked to dramatic declines and extinctions of amphibians worldwide?

Chytridiomycosis damages the skin frogs take in water and salts through, and the salt loss that follows is thought to stop their hearts.

Which naturalist discovered the zombie-ant fungus Ophiocordyceps unilateralis in 1859?

Alfred Russel Wallace found it in 1859; infected ants leave their nests, clamp onto a leaf near the forest floor and die where the fungus can fruit.

After a rust fungus ruined the coffee estates of a British island colony off India, planters switched mainly to which crop?

Tea took over Ceylon's estates, while the rust went on to spread across the world's coffee-growing regions.

Rusts and smuts, major pathogens of cereal crops, belong to which fungal group?

The club fungi include corn smut, which ruins maize yet is prized in Mexico as a delicacy called huitlacoche.

Some fungi rich in the pigment melanin appear to grow faster when exposed to what?

Ionising radiation: some moulds collected around the Chernobyl disaster site even grow toward radioactive material.

Which common infection is caused by the yeast Candida albicans overgrowing in the mouth?

Thrush comes from a yeast many of us already carry: Candida albicans lives harmlessly in the mouths and guts of many healthy adults.

A mushroom's ballistospore is launched with roughly what initial acceleration?

Launches can exceed 10,000 g: a droplet merging on the spore's surface shifts its weight so suddenly that the spore is catapulted off.

How do truffles, which grow underground, spread to new ground?

Small mammals eat them and pass them, and a truffle's strong smell is thought to have evolved to recruit these spore carriers.

Besides dogs, what have hunters trained to sniff out truffles?

Pigs are keen truffle hunters but tend to eat what they find, one reason trained dogs are now more common.

The prized white truffle Tuber magnatum is most famously found around which northern Italian town?

Alba's white truffle long resisted cultivation, until in 2019 truffles were harvested from a French orchard of inoculated trees.

Which children's author made detailed watercolours of fungi and wrote a scientific paper on how their spores germinate?

Beatrix Potter could not read her 1897 paper on spore germination to the Linnean Society herself: as a woman, she was barred from its meetings.

What happened to fungi immediately after the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs?

With most plant and animal life dead, decomposers feasted; a similar 'fungal spike' followed the Permian extinction.

Fungal enzymes called cellulases are used in which fashion process?

Stonewashing jeans once meant tumbling denim with pumice stones, which damaged machines; cellulases give the worn look instead.

Which tunnel-boring insects farm fungus gardens inside the trees they infest?

Ambrosia beetles carry fungal 'seeds' in special pouches called mycangia and grow gardens that feed their larvae and adults.

White-rot fungi are used in bioremediation because they can break down what?

Pesticides, creosote and coal tars fall to the same unfussy lignin-rotting chemistry these fungi use on dead trees.

Which food is made by letting a mould bind cooked soybeans into a firm cake?

Tempeh is said to contain vitamin B12, but that comes from bacteria riding along, and one study found none in shop-bought tempeh.

Which meat-free brand makes its protein from the fungus Fusarium venenatum?

Quorn's fungus passed about a decade of safety testing before British regulators let it be sold as food.

Portobello mushrooms are simply a mature form of which common mushroom?

The button mushroom's white form comes from a strain found on a US mushroom farm in the 1920s, which growers turned into a commercial lineage.

The 'hat-thrower' fungus Pilobolus aims its spore capsules toward what?

Light: aiming at it fires the capsule clear of the dung onto grass, where a grazing animal such as a horse swallows it and the cycle restarts.

What name is given to the glow of fungi in rotting logs?

Foxfire lit the compass and depth gauge inside the Turtle, a Revolutionary War submarine, so its pilot could read them in the dark.