Signs that bring mushrooms together with animals. Materials for the lesson

As is known, for quite a long time scientists attributed mushrooms to plants. However, attempts to separate them from the lower representatives of the flora were already made by Karl Linnaeus, who expressed doubts about this classification in his work "The System of Nature", drawing attention to the signs that bring mushrooms together with animals. But only in the 70-80s of the last century this division finally happened. These creatures of nature, by virtue of their structure and features, have signs that bring mushrooms together with animals and simultaneously with plants (roughly speaking, they represent both). Let's consider some of them.

Similarity with plants

Why did scientists take these organisms to plants for so long, because there are obvious signs that bring mushrooms together with animals? And it happened because they have characteristic properties that allowed them to be attributed to the plant kingdom :

• They, for example, can not move independently, as almost all representatives of the animal world. Although this is not quite true (under the earth, the mycelium spreads, conquers new spaces of substratum, but this movement can be associated with constant growth).
• By the way, mushrooms, like plants, grow their whole life. Unlike animals that grow to a certain size and stop their growth. So in this similarity of fungi and animals is absent.
• Many fungi reproduce by spores. Hats, for example, are capable of producing up to several tens of billions of spores for their lives. True, these disputes mostly die. But if they enter a favorable environment, then reproduction is carried out. Also come and spore plants. And the fungi are able to multiply by dividing the mycelium, sometimes even by several of its cells. This is enough to start to develop a new mycelium that can give life to new fruit bodies, spores and, hence, offspring.
• Feed mushrooms mainly by suction. And this also brings them closer to the plants.

Differences in the origin of fungi and plants

But scientists have also discovered that mushrooms and plants originate from different evolutionary branches - groups of the most ancient microscopic organisms that once lived in the World Ocean. Therefore, they still differ in evolutionary, and genetically.

At the cellular level

Cells of plants, animals and fungi are different in their structure. In fungi there is no ability for photosynthesis, they do not have chlorophyll in cells, as in plants. But in the composition of their cells there is chitin, characteristic for representatives of some animals (for example, arthropods, in which it is an important element for the creation of a shell or an external skeleton). This factor, of course, brings the fungi closer to animals.

Metabolism

Fungi are able, like animals, to store glycogen (carbohydrates). They can also output the final products of their metabolism from the body. This also makes them look like fauna.

Means of Nutrition

Mushrooms themselves do not synthesize organic matter. They are heterotrophs, that is, they consume them in the form already prepared, on the contrary, utilizing them to inorganic compounds with the help of enzymes that they can release (saprophytes). This also shows signs that bring mushrooms together with animals that absorb organic food. Mushrooms-symbionts live due to close interaction with the trees (sometimes it is even difficult to understand who is who in the intricacies of mycelium and small hairs of roots).

There are mushrooms that parasitize on other organisms - plants and animals that feed at their expense and sometimes even kill their host. At the same time, a mushroom (for example, a tinder) can survive for a long time even on a dead tree, decomposing its organic tissues and using them for food. There are even predator fungi. They feed on animals: amoebae and nematodes, catching them with an adhesive surface on their hyphae. Characteristic for mushrooms and the fact that in the process of metabolism they produce urea, as in many animals.

Results

Summing up, it can be noted that mushrooms are a special kingdom in nature, consisting of countless species: from huge mushrooms to the smallest mildew and yeast, not always noticeable with a microscope not looking. All of them are descendants of ancient eukaryotic microorganisms, which once lived in aquatic environments billions of years ago.

Some properties are related to fungi with plants (in fact, so many scholars have preferred to think until the end of the twentieth century). This is the inability to move independently, and growth throughout life, and sucking food. And with the animal world, they are brought together by heterotrophic nutrition, as well as the presence of chitin in the shells of their cells, the ability to accumulate carbohydrates, the formation of urea and its excretion during metabolism. All this makes the fungi simultaneously similar to plants and animals.