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Other examples of aquatic fungi include those living in hydrothermal areas of the ocean. [48] Widespread white fungus in wood chip mulch in an Oklahoma garden [49] As of 2020, around 148,000 species of fungi have been described by taxonomists, [8] but the global biodiversity of the fungus kingdom is not fully understood. [50]
Fungi have appeared, too, from time to time, in literature and art. Fungi create harm by spoiling food, destroying timber, and by causing diseases of crops, livestock, and humans. Fungi, mainly moulds like Penicillium and Aspergillus, spoil many stored foods. Fungi cause the majority of plant diseases, which in turn cause serious economic losses.
More recently, scholars have added a third type of interaction, where living things, whether animals, [6] plants, [7] fungi or microbes function as participants. This makes the relationships bidirectional, explicitly implying various forms of symbiosis in a complex ecology.
Mycology is the branch of biology concerned with the study of fungi, including their taxonomy, genetics, biochemical properties, and use by humans. [1] Fungi can be a source of tinder, food, traditional medicine, as well as entheogens, poison, and infection.
An organism is any living thing that functions as an individual. [1] Such a definition raises more problems than it solves, not least because the concept of an individual is also difficult. Many criteria, few of them widely accepted, have been proposed to define what an organism is.
[207] As a simple example, prior to the use of genetic evidence, fungi were thought either to be plants or to be more closely related to plants than animals. Genetic evidence suggests that the true evolutionary relationship of multicelled organisms is as shown in the cladogram below – fungi are more closely related to animals than to plants.
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Many fungi are parasitic, often causing disease to their living host plant, although some have beneficial relationships with living plants, as illustrated below. In terms of soil and humus creation, the most important fungi tend to be saprotrophic ; that is, they live on dead or decaying organic matter, thus breaking it down and converting it ...