Fungi can range from mushrooms to mildews
AUTUMN is a time for mushrooms. As the nights grow longer and cooler, the shortening days, though sometimes lovely, are often not long enough to dry the morning dew. The surface of the ground stays moist and mushrooms fruit in the damp conditions.
We are not a great people for gathering wild mushrooms; buying the cultivated species that are on sale in supermarkets is most people’s preferred choice.
Classifying the myriad of life forms that Earth supports is an ongoing challenge for the scientists who struggle to impose order of the bewildering diversity of organisms that we share the planet with. Plants and animals is an obvious two-way split.
Plants are defined as the group of life forms whose members have the ability to make their own food via the wonderful chemical process of photosynthesis. Grass absorbs water and minerals from the soil and gases from the air and synthesises these ingredients into food using sunlight to fuel the process.
Animals, on the other hand, cannot do that and must get ready-made food to survive. Cows grazing in a field eat grasses exploiting the ability of these plants to made their own food.
Where does that leave mushrooms? They are not green like regular plants. They don’t have chlorophyll and since they cannot photosynthesise they are like animals in that they cannot make their own food but must get it ready-made.
After plants and animals, that brings us to a third great group of distinct life forms, the fungi. Comprising very large numbers of species ranging from mushrooms and toadstools to moulds, mildews, rusts and yeasts, all members of the group share the common characteristic that, unlike plants, they cannot make their own food and must, like animals, eat ready-made food.
Many mushrooms and toadstools feed in forests on wood, often dead wood or the decaying remains of trees and other plants in soil. Others come indoors and try to exploit own foodstuffs like mould growing on an orange or on bread.
Some even attack ourselves growing on human skin causing conditions like ringworm and athlete’s foot.
All fungi reproduce by producing spores rather than seeds. In the common Field Mushroom, the spores are borne on the platelike, pink gills that can be seen under the cap. As the mushroom matures, the gills shed spores onto the damp soil to ensure that a new crop of mushrooms will emerge nest year.