Fungi Trivia
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54 free Fungi trivia questions with answers — nature quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
Fungi are their own kingdom, closer kin to animals than to plants, and there may be three million species of them, of which we have named barely 150,000. This quiz covers the biology: chitin cell walls, hyphae and mycelium, spores fired at 10,000 g, chytrids that swim, and the seven phyla from sac fungi to club fungi. It then follows fungi into human life: yeast and Pasteur, koji and blue cheese, Fleming's contaminated dish and the 1945 Nobel, statins and ciclosporin, ergot and aflatoxin, the death cap and the truffle pigs Italy banned. There are questions on lichens that survived open space, the mycorrhizal networks that feed nine out of ten plants, the zombie-ant fungus, the chytrid killing the world's frogs, and the Oregon honey fungus that may be the largest organism alive. If you want mushrooms specifically, our Mushroom Trivia quiz covers edible and deadly species; this one is about the whole kingdom. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on fungi, yeast, penicillin, lichens and the individual species, and each question shows its supporting sentence after you answer.
30 of 54 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which substance in their cell walls sets fungi apart from plants, bacteria and most protists?
Chitin
Chitin is made by fungi but not by human cells, so drugs that block its production, such as nikkomycin Z, are studied as antifungals.
Q 02Genetically, fungi are more closely related to which group than to plants?
Animals
Animals, including humans, share so much cell machinery with fungi that many antifungal drugs also harm our own cells.
Q 03What is the scientific study of fungi called?
Mycology
Mycology still shows its botanical past: fungi are named under the International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants.
Q 04What nickname is popularly given to the underground fungal networks that link plants together?
The Wood Wide Web
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.
Q 05The Latin word fungus is thought to be related to a Greek word meaning what?
Sponge
Sponge: Latin fungus and Greek sphongos were probably both borrowed, independently, from an older non-Indo-European word.
Q 06What are the thread-like filaments that make up the body of most fungi called?
Hyphae
Hyphae can be formidable: the rice blast fungus inflates a special cell to about 80 times atmospheric pressure to punch into rice leaves.
Q 07What is the interconnected network of fungal filaments called?
Mycelium
Mycelium can be grown on farm waste into moulded packaging, a biodegradable alternative to polystyrene foam.
Q 08How do fungi obtain their food?
Secreting enzymes, then absorbing
Secreting enzymes, then absorbing the results, means fungi digest food outside their bodies, and with termites they are the main decomposers of dead trees.
Q 09Which video game series imagines a zombie-like outbreak caused by a mutated Cordyceps fungus?
The Last of Us
The Last of Us stretches the truth: real Cordyceps fungi are parasites, but of insects and other arthropods, not people.
Q 10The largest fungal phylum, the Ascomycota, is commonly known by what name?
Sac fungi
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.
Q 11Which compound from 'magic mushrooms' has been trialled as a treatment for depression?
Psilocybin
Psilocybin crossed into medicine in Australia, where from July 2023 authorised psychiatrists could prescribe it for treatment-resistant depression.
Q 12Why are water moulds, once classed as fungi, now placed outside the fungal kingdom?
Their walls are made of cellulose
Their walls are made of cellulose, and DNA shows water moulds evolved separately from true fungi, which they only resemble.
Q 13What organism was Ötzi the Iceman carrying that may have served as tinder or medicine?
Two kinds of bracket fungus
Q 21Which mould is added to give Stilton and Danish Blue their blue veins?
Penicillium roqueforti
Penicillium roqueforti works both sides: the mould that ripens blue cheese can also spoil bread and chilled foods.
Q 22Who noticed in September 1928 that a mould contaminating a Staphylococcus culture had killed it?
Alexander Fleming
He coined the word penicillin the following March, to avoid repeating the phrase 'mould broth filtrate'.
Q 23Which two scientists shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in medicine for developing an antibiotic into a usable drug?
Florey and Chain
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.
Two kinds of bracket fungus were with him, and the birch polypore has anti-parasite properties, fitting the whipworm infestation found in his gut.
Q 14Which 1840s catastrophe was triggered by a water mould once mistaken for a fungus?
The Irish Potato Famine
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.
Q 15Lacking xylem or phloem, how do fungi like Armillaria move water long distances?
They form root-like cords called rhizomorphs
They form root-like cords called rhizomorphs, which let Armillaria reach through the soil from one tree to infect the next.
Q 16What in Oregon's Malheur National Forest is often called the largest living organism on Earth?
A honey fungus
A honey fungus colony there kills the conifers whose roots it invades, and it is thought to be thousands of years old.
Q 17Yeasts reproduce mainly by which method?
Budding
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.
Q 18Which yeast species raises most bread and ferments ale and wine?
Saccharomyces cerevisiae
Saccharomyces cerevisiae makes bread rise because the carbon dioxide it releases forms gas pockets that expand the dough.
Q 19Which microbiologist's 1850s research showed that fermentation is caused by living microbes?
Louis Pasteur
Louis Pasteur also found a twist: give yeast oxygen and it ferments less, not more, an observation now called the Pasteur effect.
Q 20Which ancient civilisation's ruins hold 4,000-year-old evidence of yeast-raised bread and brewing?
Egypt
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.
Q 24Which fungal product is used to stop transplant patients rejecting new organs?
Ciclosporin
Ciclosporin blocks calcineurin, an enzyme T cells rely on to send out inflammatory signals, so the immune attack on a new organ is damped.
Q 25Which banana replaced the Gros Michel after a soil fungus wiped out its plantations?
Cavendish
Cavendish bananas resisted that strain, but a newer one, Tropical Race 4, now threatens the Cavendish too.
Q 26Ergot fungus growing on rye caused which historical epidemic disease?
St Anthony's Fire
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.
Q 27Aflatoxins, among the most carcinogenic natural substances, are produced by which moulds?
Aspergillus species
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.
Q 28Which mushroom causes the majority of the world's fatal mushroom poisonings?
The death cap
The death cap has spread far beyond its native Europe, and in North America it has taken up with new host trees.
Q 29Which discovery in genetics was made using the bread mould Neurospora crassa?
The one gene, one enzyme idea
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.
Q 30Which fungal disease has killed millions of hibernating bats in North America?
White-nose syndrome
White-nose syndrome makes bats wake too often during hibernation, so they burn through their fat and starve before spring.