104 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.

Which New World insects are true farmers, raising a fungus crop in underground gardens?

Leafcutter ants do not eat the greenery they carry home: they feed it to their fungus, weed out rival molds, and raise their larvae on the crop.

Which color-changing dye, a staple of school chemistry lessons, is made from lichens?

Litmus comes from lichens ground up with ammonia, and paper soaked in it turns red or blue to show whether a liquid is sour or alkaline.

Which hallucinogen did Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann first make in 1938 from the ergot fungus of rye?

LSD sat unexplored for five years, until Hofmann accidentally dosed himself in 1943 and discovered what it does to the mind.

Which common scalp complaint is linked to Malassezia, a yeast that normally lives on human heads?

Dandruff can flare when the yeast grows too fast and disturbs the natural renewal of cells, which is why some medicated shampoos carry the antifungal ketoconazole.

What folklore name is given to a circle of mushrooms that widens as the hidden fungus grows outward?

Fairy ring folklore in Western Europe blamed elves or fairies dancing in a circle, while German tradition saw the spot where witches danced on Walpurgis Night.

Amanita muscaria, the red toadstool with white warts seen in countless storybooks, has what common name?

Fly agaric is thought to owe its name to an old household trick: pieces of the cap were sprinkled in milk to kill flies.

Mushrooms left in sunlight or under ultraviolet lamps become a rich source of which nutrient?

Vitamin D is scarce in mushrooms grown in the dark, but ultraviolet rays convert a compound in their cells into the D2 form, even after harvest.

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

The Caterpillar tells Alice that a bite from one side of the mushroom will make her larger and a bite from the other side smaller.

Which once-dominant tree of eastern US forests was all but wiped out by a fungal blight from Asia?

American chestnut numbered nearly four billion trees when the fungus arrived on imported Japanese nursery stock in the early 1900s; about 40 years later the forests were gutted.

Which drink's 1516 Bavarian purity law listed just three ingredients and made no mention of yeast?

Beer could be made only from water, barley and hops under the law; brewers passed yeast from batch to batch, but what it actually did was not understood until much later.

Which tree was devastated in Europe and North America by a fungus carried by bark-boring insects?

Elm disease is called 'Dutch' only because women scientists in the Netherlands identified the fungus behind it from 1921 onwards.

Amatoxins, the poisons in the deadliest Amanita mushrooms, do their worst damage to which organ?

Liver cells die off quickly because the toxin stops them repairing themselves, and as little as half a mushroom can cause severe injury.

What name is given to the thin, papery ribs under a mushroom's cap, where its spores are produced?

Gills matter to foragers too: their color, crowding and the way they join the stem are key clues to a mushroom's identity.

What do mushroom hunters make by leaving a cap face down on paper overnight to help name their find?

A spore print reveals the color of the powder that drops from the cap, a diagnostic feature in most mushroom handbooks.

The Mexican delicacy huitlacoche is a smut fungus harvested from the swollen kernels of which crop?

Corn infected with the fungus sells for a significantly higher price than healthy ears, and the swollen galls go into quesadillas and soups.

The rubbery 'mother' used to brew kombucha is a living mat of yeast and which other microbes?

Bacteria give the mat its name: SCOBY stands for symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast.

What do biologists call the spore-producing structure of which a mushroom is the best-known kind?

Fruiting body is the term because a mushroom is only the reproductive part: the rest of the organism lives hidden underground or inside a log.

The common ink cap mushroom is edible, but causes flushing and nausea if eaten within hours of what?

Alcohol reacts badly with coprine, a compound in the mushroom that works like the anti-drinking drug disulfiram, hence the nickname tippler's bane.

Which US state is home to Kennett Square, a town nicknamed the Mushroom Capital of the World?

Pennsylvania farms around the town grow hundreds of millions of pounds of mushrooms a year, and Kennett Square celebrates with an annual Mushroom Festival and parade.

Which white meadow fungus can grow bigger than a basketball and hold trillions of spores?

Giant puffball specimens can reach 80 cm across, and unlike most mushrooms they make every one of their spores on the inside.

Serpula lacrymans, the fungus that crumbles the timbers of old houses, is better known by which name?

Dry rot is a misnomer, because every timber-decaying fungus needs a minimum of dampness before it can start to feed.

Which gas, given off as yeast feeds on the sugars in dough, makes a loaf of bread rise?

Carbon dioxide forms as the yeast converts fermentable sugars, and the trapped gas inflates the dough so the loaf bakes up lighter and softer.

Many lichens are so sensitive to their surroundings that scientists use them as cheap monitors of what?

Air pollution heavy with sulfur fumes can leave a district with no lichens at all, though a few tough species thrive on city pavements.

Which dark-capped mushroom of East Asian cooking is traditionally grown on logs of oak or chinquapin?

Shiitake means 'shii mushroom' in Japanese, after the chinquapin tree whose dead logs it is typically raised on.

Which prized mushroom with a ridged, pitted cap often springs up in abundance after a wildfire?

Morel hunters head for last year's burn scars, because several species grow abundantly in forests that have recently burned.

The toxin in brain-shaped Gyromitra mushrooms breaks down into a chemical that is also used as what?

Rocket fuel is the compound's day job, igniting on contact with its oxidizer in spacecraft engines; in a person who eats the mushroom it attacks the nervous system.

Oyster mushrooms are carnivores of a sort, killing and digesting which tiny soil creatures?

Nematodes are microscopic roundworms, and digesting them is believed to be how the mushroom gets its nitrogen.

Which Roman emperor, Agrippina's husband, is said to have been killed with poisoned mushrooms?

Claudius died in AD 54, and ancient historians agree it was poison, possibly served in mushrooms or smeared on a feather put down his throat.

Which flowering plants have dust-like seeds so short of food that they need a fungus to germinate?

Orchids pack their seeds with virtually no energy store, so each seedling is fed by a fungal partner until it can make its own food.

The ghost pipe, a waxy white woodland plant, steals its food through fungi because it lacks which pigment?

Chlorophyll would be wasted on the ghost pipe, which never photosynthesizes: it saps food from fungi that are in turn connected to nearby trees.

Fungi store spare energy not as starch but as which carbohydrate, also stockpiled in human muscle?

Glycogen is the reserve our own muscles draw on during exercise; fungi also keep trehalose and mannitol in store.

The fungus Massospora turns the abdomens of which noisy insects into spore plugs while they keep flying?

Cicadas infected this way scatter spores like flying salt shakers, and infected males even flick their wings like females to lure healthy males close.

Which American ecologist's five-kingdom scheme of 1969 set fungi apart in a kingdom of their own?

Robert Whittaker sorted living things mainly by how they feed: plants make their food, animals eat it, and fungi absorb it from their surroundings.

Since 1986, yeast cells have been used to manufacture the vaccine against which viral disease?

Hepatitis B vaccine was once purified from the blood of human carriers; the yeast version makes only a harmless surface protein of the virus.

Which lung infection of the US Southwest is caught by breathing in Coccidioides spores from desert dust?

Valley fever takes its name from California's San Joaquin Valley, and a 1977 windstorm there caused hundreds of cases in places hundreds of miles away.

Which tough polymer that stiffens tree trunks can white-rot fungi digest but brown-rot fungi cannot?

Lignin is what brown-rot fungi leave behind; white rot is named for the pale, stringy residue that remains once it too has been eaten.

Bird's nest fungi fling their egg-like spore packets up to a meter from the cup using the force of what?

Raindrops that land in the cup at the right angle knock the 'eggs' out, which is why biologists call the nests splash cups.

What is the technical name for the stalk that holds up a mushroom's cap?

Stipe details such as a skirt or a cup at the base are often needed to identify a mushroom, so foragers dig specimens up rather than cutting them.

Many antifungal drugs attack which molecule, the fungal counterpart of cholesterol in cell membranes?

Ergosterol is present in fungal cell membranes but absent from our own, so a drug aimed at it can kill the fungus while sparing the patient.

Which brainless organism has solved mazes and recreated Tokyo's rail network in laboratory dishes?

Slime mold was once classed with the fungi but is really an amoeba; given oat flakes laid out like cities, it grew links much like Tokyo's real rail lines.

The mold strain behind mass-produced penicillin was found on which fruit in a Peoria, Illinois, market?

A cantaloupe bought in 1943 beat every other sample tested by the government lab in Peoria, and the strain was nicknamed after the fruit.

What does the US Environmental Protection Agency say must be controlled to stop mold growing indoors?

Moisture is the one requirement a householder can remove: mold spores cannot be eliminated indoors, and they will grow on almost any organic material that stays wet.

Which sweet white wine of Bordeaux depends on a gray mold, Botrytis, shriveling the grapes on the vine?

Sauternes producers may once have kept the mold a secret, wine expert Hugh Johnson has suggested, since drinkers might balk at fungus-infested grapes.

Which sour additive in soft drinks and candy is made industrially by feeding sugar to a black mold?

Citric acid once came from Italian citrus fruit; in 1917 a food chemist found the mold could make it from sugar, and Pfizer was producing it that way two years later.

Which class of prescription drugs was first discovered in a mold growing on rice from a Kyoto grain shop?

Statins grew out of Akira Endo's search through 6,000 compounds for one that blocked the making of cholesterol; the winner became the first drug of its class.

Which space station, launched in 1986, became notorious for the mold growing behind its panels?

Mir had molds growing behind panels and inside the air-conditioning, and the smell was often cited as the strongest impression visitors took home.

Which soft Normandy cheese is sprayed with a mold that grows into its white, edible rind?

Camembert rinds were a matter of chance before fungi were understood, and were most often blue-gray with brown spots rather than white.

Sooty mold blackens garden leaves by growing on honeydew, the sugary waste of which insects?

Aphids, scales and whiteflies all excrete the sticky sugar, which can rain down on plants growing beneath an infested tree.

Katsuobushi, the rock-hard base of Japanese soup stock, is which fish smoked and cured with mold?

Skipjack tuna fillets are simmered, smoked, then sprayed with a mold culture and shut in a cultivation room for two weeks to draw out the last of the water.

Which glossy shelf fungus, known as lingzhi in China, is revered as the 'mushroom of immortality'?

Reishi is the Japanese reading of lingzhi, a fungus revered for over 2,000 years and usually brewed in hot water because it tastes so bitter.