Fun facts

MUSHROOM FUN FACTS

Mushrooms are neither plants nor animals; they were reclassified in the 1960’s into the separate Kingdom of Fungi. It is a hidden kingdom. The part of the fungus that we see is only the “fruit” of the organism. The living body of the fungus is a mycelium made out of a web of tiny filaments called hyphae. The mycelium is usually hidden in the soil, in wood, or another food source. A mycelium may fill a single ant in the case of parasitic fungi, or cover many acres. The branching hyphae can add over a half mile (1 kilometer) of total length to the mycelium each day. These webs live unseen until they develop mushrooms, puffballs, truffles, brackets, cups, “bird’s nests,” “corals” or other fruiting bodies. If the mycelium produces microscopic fruiting bodies, people may never notice the fungus.

All mushrooms are fungi but not all fungi are mushrooms. The Kingdom of Fungi also includes yeasts, slime molds, rusts and several other types of related organisms.

There are an estimated 1.5 to 2 million species of fungi on planet Earth, of which only about 80,000 have been properly identified. Theoretically, there are 6 species of fungi for every 1 species of green plants.

In some ways, mushrooms are more closely related to animals than plants. Just like us, mushrooms take in oxygen for their digestion and metabolism and "exhale" carbon dioxide as a waste product. Fungal proteins are similar in many ways to animal proteins.

Mushrooms grow from spores, not seeds, and a single mature mushroom will drop as many as 16 billion spores!

HEALTH AND WELLNESS

Mushrooms have been successfully used in traditional Chinese medicine for thousands of years to treat many different types of health conditions. Western science and medicine are finally beginning to recognize and utilize some of the medicinally active compounds in mushrooms and elucidate their modes of action.