97 Fun Facts About Mushrooms

A mushroom is technically which part of a fungus?

Its spore-bearing fruiting body is all a mushroom is: the rest of the fungus is a web of fine threads hidden in soil or wood, which sends mushrooms up when conditions suit.

Fungal cell walls contain which substance in place of plants' cellulose?

Chitin, the horny stuff of crab and lobster shells, stiffens fungal cell walls; it is one of the features that put fungi in a kingdom apart from plants.

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

Animals. Fungi are so close to us chemically and genetically that fungal diseases are very hard to treat, yet their study was long filed under botany.

Roughly how many species of fungi had scientists formally described by 2020?

About 150,000 had names by 2020, yet estimates of the true total run from 2.2 to 3.8 million species, so the great majority of fungi are still unknown to science.

Ink cap mushrooms are named for what?

Dissolving into black liquid is how an ink cap ends: it digests itself from the rim upward once its spores ripen, until little more than a bare stem is left standing.

What does the Malheur forest's 'humongous fungus' do to the conifers above it?

Kills them: its root disease creeps from tree to tree on shoestring-like cords, and foresters mapping the damage found one individual, put at 2,400 to 8,650 years old, behind it all.

Which mushroom is blamed for most of the world's fatal mushroom poisonings?

Death cap toxins survive boiling, cooking, freezing and drying, and a small piece of a single mushroom is enough to kill an adult.

Which Roman emperor is said to have been killed with a dish of poisoned mushrooms in AD 54?

Claudius was poisoned by his wife Agrippina, in the account most ancient writers give, though they differ on the details; his death put her son on the throne instead of his own.

Alpha-amanitin, the chief toxin of the deadliest mushrooms, attacks which organs?

Liver and kidneys fail, but the first symptoms take 6 to 24 hours to appear, long enough that many victims never connect their illness with the mushrooms they ate.

The 'destroying angel' mushrooms are notable for being what colour?

Pure white from cap to stem, a destroying angel can pass for an edible field mushroom or, when young, a puffball, which is why foragers are told to slice puffball-like finds in half.

The white spots on a fly agaric's cap are the remains of what?

A veil that wrapped the young mushroom tears apart as the cap swells, leaving white scraps stuck to the red skin; heavy rain can wash them off, so some fly agarics have no spots at all.

The fly agaric may have earned its name from its historical use to do what?

Kill flies: in parts of Europe the cap was crumbled into a saucer of milk, which drew house flies in and poisoned them.

Indigenous peoples of which region used the fly agaric as an intoxicant?

Drying converts its ibotenic acid into the more potent muscimol; fatal poisonings are extremely rare.

Shigeru Miyamoto says he made Mario's power-up a mushroom because mushrooms have long been linked with what?

Magical realms: Miyamoto says mushrooms have always gone with them, and he has dismissed the popular story that Alice in Wonderland inspired the item as a misunderstanding of an old interview.

Button, cremini and portobello mushrooms are all what?

One species at different ages and colours: Agaricus bisporus is picked young as the white button or the brown cremini, and a cremini left to open out is a portobello, which is why it is also sold as a 'baby bella'.

In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, which character sits on a mushroom smoking a hookah?

The Caterpillar tells Alice that one side of the mushroom will make her taller and the other shorter, so she breaks off a piece of each and nibbles them to set her own size.

Which Pennsylvania town is known as the Mushroom Capital of the World?

Kennett Square owes the title, by local tradition, to Quaker flower growers who around 1885 began raising mushrooms in the wasted space under their carnation beds; by 2017 the area grew half the US crop.

Growers treat some mushrooms before sale to boost which vitamin?

Vitamin D forms when ultraviolet light strikes ergosterol, a compound in mushrooms much like our cholesterol; farmed mushrooms grow in the dark and have almost none until growers give them a dose of UV.

Which country grows by far the most of the world's cultivated mushrooms?

China accounted for more than nine-tenths of the world's mushroom harvest in UN figures for 2022 and 2023, about a hundred times as much as Japan, the runner-up, whose names for mushrooms the world borrows.

Which Japanese mushroom, sold as a bundle of long, thin white stems, is named after the hackberry tree?

Enoki are raised in the dark, which keeps them white, long-stemmed and tiny-capped; wild ones, growing in daylight on dead wood, have short stems and orange-brown caps and look nothing like them.

What do oyster mushrooms, among the few carnivorous fungi, trap and digest?

Tiny worms called nematodes are caught, killed and digested by the fungus, a rare case of a mushroom that takes live prey as well as feeding on dead timber.

Morel mushrooms are recognisable by which distinctive cap texture?

Honeycomb pits and ridges mark a true morel, and its spores form inside the pits; the prized mushroom must be cooked through, because raw or undercooked morels can make the eater ill.

Which ancient mummy was found carrying lumps of birch fungus on leather strips, probably as medicine?

Ötzi the Iceman died in the Alps some 5,300 years ago with two pieces of birch fungus in his kit; it was a folk remedy into the 20th century and is toxic to whipworm, a gut parasite he carried.

Italy's white truffle, Tuber magnatum, is most associated with the countryside around which town?

Alba stages an international white truffle fair every autumn; the fungus is so prized that a single 1.5 kg specimen, sniffed out by a dog in 2007, fetched $330,000 at auction.

Why did Italy ban the use of pigs for truffle hunting in 1985?

Their digging damaged the fungal mycelium, the buried web that grows the truffles, and cut the harvest for years; a dog can be taught to point at the spot and leave the digging to the hunter.

Sows were long thought to hunt truffles so eagerly because the smell resembles what?

A boar's sex pheromone was the textbook answer until a 1990 study pointed to dimethyl sulphide instead: pigs ignore the pheromone and root for the sulphur smell, expecting a meal.

Matsutake, prized in Japanese cuisine, takes its name from which tree?

Pine: matsu is Japanese for the pine tree the mushroom grows beneath; Japan's own harvest collapsed in the late 20th century, so buyers now pay high prices for matsutake picked abroad.

Huitlacoche, a Mexican delicacy, is actually what?

A fungus that infects corn swells the kernels into dark galls; farmers elsewhere fight it as a yield-cutting disease called corn smut, but in Mexico the young galls are a delicacy eaten in quesadillas.

The bracket fungus Laetiporus sulphureus, or sulphur shelf, has a second common name inspired by what?

Its taste and texture like poultry earned it the name chicken of the woods; most people find the young brackets good eating, but they give a minority of eaters nausea or dizziness.

Roughly how many spores can a single large giant puffball contain?

Several trillion: almost the whole ball, which can grow as big as a football or far bigger, is spore-making tissue that ripens into brown dust and escapes as the skin breaks up.

Why do fairy rings form in a circle?

The mycelium spreads outward as the centre dies: the fungus starts from one spot, grows evenly in every direction and fruits only at its living edge, so a ring can go on widening for hundreds of years.

In German tradition, fairy rings mark where which beings danced?

Witches: the German name is Hexenringe, witches' rings, for their Walpurgis Night dance; in Austrian lore the circles were scorched into the ground by the fiery tails of dragons.

'Foxfire' is the name for what fungal phenomenon?

A glow from bioluminescent rotting wood lit the instruments of the Turtle, the one-man American submarine built in 1775: bits of the glowing wood were fixed to the needles so the pilot could read them in the dark.

Which insects does the 'zombie' fungus Ophiocordyceps force to climb a plant and clamp their jaws on a leaf before dying?

Carpenter ants infected by the fungus leave their trails, climb a low plant and lock their jaws in a final grip; a stalk then grows from the dead ant's head and sheds spores on the forest floor below.

In HBO's The Last of Us, civilisation collapses after a Cordyceps fungus adapts to what?

Higher temperatures from climate change: the series opens on a 1968 talk show where a scientist warns that fungi cannot survive human body heat, but could evolve to if the world grew warmer.

Banker R. Gordon Wasson described his Mexican mushroom ceremony in a 1957 photo essay for which magazine?

Life ran the essay in May 1957, and it drew so many outsiders to the Mexican village that the healer who had led his ceremony was shunned by her neighbours and her house was burned down.

Which US state became the first to legalise the supervised use of psilocybin, in a 2020 ballot?

Oregon voters passed Measure 109 in November 2020, which has the state license centres where adults can take the drug under supervision; Colorado passed a similar measure two years later.

Which children's author also wrote a scientific paper on how fungal spores germinate?

Beatrix Potter painted fungi in exact detail on family holidays, and her paper was read before London's Linnean Society in 1897, five years before Peter Rabbit reached the bookshops.

Which scientist discovered penicillin in 1928 after a mould spoiled one of his bacterial cultures?

Alexander Fleming came back from a holiday to find that a stray mould had killed the bacteria growing around it on a culture plate; he first called its active substance 'mould juice'.

A lichen is a partnership between a fungus and what?

Algae or cyanobacteria make sugars from sunlight and feed the fungus, which in return gathers moisture from the air and shades its partners from harsh light.

Which gas, given off by yeast as it feeds on sugar, makes bread dough rise?

Carbon dioxide and alcohol are what yeast, a single-celled fungus, makes from sugar: bakers want the gas and let the oven drive off the alcohol, while brewers are after the alcohol.

Why do stinkhorn fungi smell of rotting meat?

To draw insects that spread their spores: carrion-loving insects feed on the slimy spore mass at the tip and carry it off, and the stalk can burst from its underground 'egg' within an hour.

Fungi play what essential ecological role?

Principal decomposers: fungi ooze digestive enzymes into dead wood and leaves and absorb what dissolves, which hands the nutrients locked inside back to the soil for plants to use again.

Toadstool is a folk name for mushrooms thought poisonous; what do scientists say separates the two?

Nothing: the names overlap, and science draws no line between them; 'toadstool' is medieval English for a toad's stool, from a time when toads themselves were thought highly poisonous.

The thin, blade-like ribs under a mushroom's cap, where its spores are made, are called what?

Gills pack a large spore-making surface into a small cap: the spores form on the faces of the thin blades and drop from between them into the air.

Which common itchy skin infection is caused by fungi that feed on the keratin in skin, hair and nails?

Ringworm involves no worm at all: the name comes from the ring-shaped patches the fungi leave on the skin, and athlete's foot is the same kind of infection on the feet.

Which brown-capped mushroom, native to East Asia, is traditionally farmed on oak and other hardwood logs?

Shiitake feeds on the dead wood of oaks and their relatives, so growers raise it on cut logs or blocks of sawdust; its Japanese name means mushroom of the shii, one of those trees.

Melanin-rich fungi that seem to feed on radiation were found growing inside which wrecked nuclear plant?

Chernobyl's fungi were seen steering their growth towards radioactive graphite left by the disaster, a behaviour scientists named radiotropism.

Which comic characters, created by the Belgian cartoonist Peyo, live in a forest village of mushroom-shaped houses?

The Smurfs began as side characters in Peyo's Johan and Peewit comic, where their mushroom homes stood on bare, rocky ground before later stories moved the village to a forest clearing.

Mushrooms can be farmed in dark caves and tunnels because fungi, unlike green plants, do not carry out which process?

Photosynthesis turns sunlight into food for plants, whereas a mushroom takes all its energy from the compost it digests, so growers use light only as a cue that tells the crop when to appear.

Which 1940 Disney film features a troupe of dancing mushrooms performing to Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite?

Fantasia's mushroom dancers were animated by Art Babbitt, who is said to have studied the Three Stooges to work out how they should move.

Which British meat-substitute brand, launched in 1985, is made from the fermented soil fungus Fusarium venenatum?

Quorn's key ingredient, mycoprotein, comes from a microfungus discovered in a soil sample in 1967 and grown in towering air-lift fermenters.

Which storybook elephant is crowned king after the old ruler dies from eating a poisonous mushroom?

Babar had just come home from years in the city, and the herd's elders chose him to rule for the worldly knowledge he had picked up among people.

Which seafood gives its name to the orange-red 'mushroom' formed when a parasitic mould engulfs a Russula or milk cap?

Lobster mushrooms are the work of the parasite Hypomyces lactifluorum, which turns its host the shade of a cooked shell and even tames the peppery heat of some milk caps.

The world's largest edible mushroom, with a cap up to a metre wide, grows from the nests of which African insects?

Termites of the genus Macrotermes raise the fungus on part-digested leaves as their main food, and its giant mushroom, Termitomyces titanicus, was not formally described until 1980.

White-nose syndrome, a fungal illness first seen in New York State in 2006, has killed millions of which creatures?

Bats pick up the fungus Pseudogymnoascus destructans, which colonises their skin; the same fungus is found on their cousins in Europe and Asia without causing unusual die-offs.

Which Nintendo character, a loyal servant of Princess Peach, has a head shaped like a spotted mushroom cap?

Toad's mushroom top is part of his body and not a hat, a long-running fan question that Nintendo producer Yoshiaki Koizumi finally settled in 2018.

Sparassis crispa, a pale, frilly fungus that grows at the foot of conifer trunks, is named after which vegetable?

Cauliflower fungus has so many folds that cooks are told to clean it with a toothbrush under running water, because grubs and needles get caught in the jumbled flesh.

Which fungus of rye, blamed for medieval outbreaks of St Anthony's fire, yields the acid from which LSD is made?

Ergot poisoning burned so fiercely in the limbs that it was named after the monks of St Anthony who nursed its victims; the fungus holds lysergic acid, the starting point for LSD.

Which tree epidemic, caused by a fungus that bark beetles carry, ravaged the British countryside from the late 1960s?

Dutch elm disease is named for the scientists in the Netherlands who identified its fungus in the 1920s; a far more virulent strain reached Britain around 1967, apparently on imported logs.

Which destructive decay of building timbers is caused by the fungus Serpula lacrymans?

Dry rot is a misleading label, since the fungus needs damp timber to get started; its Latin name is nearer the mark, meaning 'creeping' and 'making tears'.

Bird's nest fungi hold small egg-like spore packets in a cup; what flings those 'eggs' up to a metre away?

A raindrop landing in the cup at the right angle splashes the packets out, which is why botanists call the little nests splash-cups.

The fungus Pilobolus, which shoots its spore capsule with an acceleration of over 20,000 g, grows on what?

Herbivore dung is its home, so Pilobolus aims at the early morning sun to shoot its capsule clear of the pat and onto grass, where a grazer will swallow it and start the cycle again.

Amadou, a spongy material cut from the hoof fungus that grows on tree trunks, was prized for centuries for what purpose?

Lighting fires was amadou's chief use, because it catches a spark struck from flint and smoulders slowly; it can also be pressed into a felt for making hats.

Ciclosporin, a drug isolated from a soil fungus collected in Norway, transformed which branch of surgery in the 1980s?

Organ transplants became far safer once ciclosporin, in medical use from 1983, could stop the body rejecting a donated organ; drug company staff found its fungus in a routine soil sample.

Growers of which fruit sometimes welcome the grey mould Botrytis cinerea for the concentrated sweetness it brings?

Grapes shrivelled by the mould in dry weather lose water but keep their sugar, giving dessert wines such as Sauternes and Tokaji; vintners call this welcome infection 'noble'.

Massospora fungi drug their hosts with stimulants while replacing the abdomens of which noisy summer insects?

Cicadas infected by Massospora keep flying and trying to mate while a plug of spores spills from their bodies, earning them the nickname 'flying salt shakers of death'.

Known as cep in France and penny bun in Britain, the prized wild mushroom Boletus edulis goes by which Italian name?

Porcini means 'porcine', an echo of the ancient Romans, who called these fat-stemmed mushrooms suilli, or hog mushrooms.

Which Japanese-named mushroom, known in English as hen-of-the-woods, sprouts at the base of old oaks and maples?

Maitake means 'dancing mushroom' in Japanese, and cooks there serve it as tempura or with soba noodles.

Which varnished-looking bracket fungus has been revered in East Asia for 2,000 years as the 'mushroom of immortality'?

Reishi is the Japanese reading of the name lingzhi, and under some growing conditions it forms no cap at all, branching instead into shapes like antlers.

Hericium erinaceus, an edible fungus that grows as a clump of dangling pale spines, has which common name?

Lion's mane is its usual English name; in Chinese it is the 'monkey-head mushroom', and its Japanese name honours the mountain hermits called yamabushi.

The rubbery brown fungus so common on elder trees is named after which body part?

An ear is what its folded brown brackets resemble, and its Latin name, auricula-judae, recalls the old belief that Judas Iscariot hanged himself from an elder, the tree it favours.

The coal-like fungus Daldinia concentrica is named in Britain after cakes supposedly burnt by which Anglo-Saxon king?

Alfred the Great, the legend goes, was hiding in a country homestead and told to watch the baking, but fell asleep; the round dark fungus looks like the result and burns slowly, like charcoal.

Which fungus, Xylaria polymorpha, pushes up dark, charred-looking growths around decaying tree stumps?

Dead man's fingers look charred on the outside, like burned sticks poking from the ground, yet the flesh inside is pale.

Which poisonous orange mushroom, easily mistaken for a chanterelle, gives off a faint blue-green light in the dark?

Jack-o'-lantern mushrooms shine only from the underside of the cap, using the enzyme luciferase much as fireflies do, and unlike chanterelles they carry the toxin illudin S.

Which common name is given to Fistulina hepatica, an oak-tree bracket that bleeds a dull red juice when cut?

Beefsteak fungus looks like a slab of raw meat on the trunk, and it stains living oak a reddish brown that makes the timber more desirable.

Which common bracket fungus, Trametes versicolor, is named for its fan of concentric multicoloured bands?

Turkey tail gets its name from the spread feathers of a wild gobbler, and an extract of the fungus is approved in Japan as a supporting therapy in cancer treatment.

Which American avant-garde composer, an avid amateur mushroom hunter, co-founded the New York Mycological Society?

John Cage's mushroom collection is kept in a university library in Santa Cruz, California, and in 1969 he lectured on edible fungi as part of a music course.

Which American mycologist, featured in the film Fantastic Fungi, gave his name to a character in Star Trek: Discovery?

Paul Stamets is also known for his hat, which is made of amadou, a felt-like material prepared from a bracket fungus.

In which Tintin adventure does the young reporter find giant exploding mushrooms on an expedition to the Arctic Ocean?

The Shooting Star's giant fungi sprout because a new metal in the meteorite speeds up growth, and critics later read them as a strange foretaste of the atomic mushroom clouds of 1945.

In which 2017 film does Alma feed the dressmaker Reynolds Woodcock an omelette laced with poisonous wild mushrooms?

Phantom Thread has Reynolds realise the dish is poisoned and swallow a mouthful anyway, asking Alma for a kiss before the sickness takes hold.

Which American poet's debut collection, The Colossus, includes a poem titled simply 'Mushrooms'?

Sylvia Plath saw The Colossus and Other Poems published in 1960, and it was the only volume of her poetry to appear in her lifetime.

Which Canadian ecologist used isotope tracers to show that birch and Douglas fir share food through fungal networks?

Suzanne Simard went on to describe 'mother trees', the largest in a forest, which act as hubs of the underground network and can supply seedlings with the nutrients they need.

Which Swiss chemist, the first person to synthesise LSD, later isolated and named psilocybin from magic mushrooms?

Albert Hofmann took the first deliberate LSD trip on 19 April 1943, a date remembered as Bicycle Day because he rode home on his bike as the drug took hold.

Which Italian water retriever from the Po delta was turned to truffle hunting once its home marshes were drained?

Lagotto Romagnolo dogs once brought shot game back to dry land or to hunters' punts, a retrieving instinct later turned on buried fungi.

The black winter truffle Tuber melanosporum, native to southern Europe, is commonly named after which French region?

Périgord truffles give off dimethyl sulfide, the scent that leads trained dogs to where they lie buried among the roots of oak and hazel.

Which finely chopped mushroom mixture, cooked down in butter to a paste, is a key layer in a classic beef Wellington?

Duxelles is said to be the creation of the 17th-century French chef La Varenne, who named it after his employer, the marquis d'Uxelles.

What name is given to the long, branching filaments that weave together to make up the bulk of a fungus?

Hyphae grow at their tips and are typically just 4 to 6 micrometres wide; woven together in a mass, they form the mycelium.

What term describes the partnership between a fungus and the roots of a plant, found in most plant species?

Mycorrhiza fungi probably served as a makeshift root system for the first land plants, which colonised poor soils before evolving roots of their own.

Which mould, hailed in Japan as the 'national fungus', is used to brew sake and to ferment soy sauce and miso?

Koji, the mould Aspergillus oryzae, turns the starch in rice, barley or sweet potato into sugars that can then be fermented into drinks such as sake and shochu.

Which Indonesian food from Java is made when a Rhizopus mould binds cooked soybeans into a firm cake?

Tempeh was a common food in Central Java by around 1700, and its mould grows naturally on the teak and hibiscus leaves that Javanese cooks used as food wrappings.

The chytrid fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, discovered in 1998, has devastated which creatures worldwide?

Amphibians die when the fungus damages their skin, upsetting their balance of water and salt until the heart fails; its Latin name begins with the Greek word for frog.

In mycology, what is the technical name for the stem or stalk that holds up a mushroom's cap?

Stipe is the word, and raising the cap helps a mushroom release its spores into wind currents; brackets and puffballs do without one.

Which woodland fungus opens when its outer skin splits into segments that peel back around a central spore sac?

Earthstar translates the genus name Geastrum, built from words for earth and star; in some kinds the rays arch downward and lift the spore sac off the ground.

Which American ecologist proposed the five-kingdom system of 1969 that gave fungi a kingdom of their own?

Robert Whittaker sorted living things mainly by how they feed, with fungi set apart as absorbers of decaying matter; Ernst Haeckel had moved them out of the plants decades earlier but was largely ignored.

Classic cap-and-stem mushrooms belong to which fungal division, named for the club-shaped cells that bear its spores?

Basidiomycota carry their spores, usually four at a time, on the outside of club-shaped cells called basidia; the group also takes in puffballs, stinkhorns and chanterelles.

In 1893, which Paris organisation produced the first pure-culture mushroom spawn for growing on composted horse manure?

The Pasteur Institute made its sterilised spawn in the city that gave the cultivated mushroom one of its many names, the champignon de Paris.