Are fungi plants, animals, or something else?
Mushrooms grow like plants, but your DNA is closer to a mushroom's than a mushroom's is to a tree.
▶ Start the storyNeither. Fungi, the group that includes mushrooms, molds and yeasts, make up a kingdom of their own, and the surprise is who their closest relatives are: genetically, fungi are closer to animals than to plants.
It is easy to see why people got it wrong. Before scientists could compare DNA, they sorted fungi with the plants, because the two look alike in their way of life: both mostly stay put and both have a similar general form and growth habit. But a fungus does not . It cannot make its own food from light. Like an animal, it has to get food that other living things made, and it does this by absorbing dissolved organic molecules, usually after releasing digestive into its surroundings. Its cell walls are different too: they contain , the same tough material found in the exoskeletons of insects and other arthropods.
Looks like a plant
- Mostly stays put
- Similar general form and growth habit
- Moves by growing
Lives like an animal
- Cannot
- Absorbs food made by other living things
- Genetically a closer relative
Fungi have been part of human life for a very long time. Ötzi the Iceman, the Neolithic man found frozen in the Austrian Alps and about 5,300 years old, carried two kinds of polypore mushrooms, which may have been used as tinder or as medicine. Since then we have eaten mushrooms and truffles, and used fungi to raise bread and to ferment wine, beer and soy sauce.
Most of the kingdom is hidden. About 148,000 species have been described, yet scientists estimate there may be between 2.2 and 3.8 million. And all around us they work as the principal , breaking down dead things.
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Recap
Fungi are not plants: they cannot photosynthesize, they absorb food after digesting it outside, and their DNA puts them next to animals.
💡 A trick to remember it · A mushroom stands like a plant but eats like a cousin of yours: no sunlight, just a meal soaked up through its skin.
Surprising fact · Genetically, fungi are more closely related to animals than to plants.
Sources (1)
No source, no claim. Every fact in this lesson (12 claims) cites at least one of these.