Folks, is honey a fungus?
this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2023
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Plenty of people eat algae (and diatoms), which are neither plants, animals, or fungi, they're chromists. Also, mushrooms aren't the only fungi we eat. Wila and Caribou Lichen are examples of edible lichens, and Morels actually aren't mushrooms.
There are also tons of bacteria and other fungi that are used in the production of food, but I don't think they count directly as food.
If you are into stuff like that: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0119248
Plenty new kingdom and domain classifications happening within the last decade(s).
There is also a lot of cross interactions between them, but for classification it is still somewhat useful and somewhat bad.
However OP's main point of that everything basically belongs to life or side products that we it remains. Even though we also consume stuff like salt, which is not alive.
This is interesting. In my undergraduate biology courses we worked using the three domain model (Archaea, Eukaryota, and Bacteria) and my understanding was the superkingdom or empire view was antiquated. I didn't realize there was still research or debate about the organization of life at the highest level.
I'm a bit confused as with the three domain view, it is informed by genomic analysis (specifically of highly conserved tRNA which all life appears to have, review paper here, and a link to a more recent tree of life which I am familiar with here) which is an empirical grounding through raw data instead of the models proposed which don't seem to have as comprehensive of a backing.
Newer tree of life below:
I wonder if it'll be like the definition of species where there are several criteria kept and used depending on the context. It's hard to imagine since all of the different methods of classification could be used fruitfully without relying on them as higher level classifications. For example the two superkingdoms mentioned in the paper you linked works well enough with Gram-Positive and Gram-Negative diagnostic tests and any exceptions would warrant individual study without necessarily needing to rely on some higher order organizing principles at least at present.
As an aside: I read on Wikipedia that Ernst Mayr didn't think the three domain model made sense :/ I wonder what his reasoning was... Something that I encounter is the great personalities and thinkers being kinda on the wrong side and wishing they were right since I think they are kinda cool. I think the same applies to Stephen Jay Gould and his idea of Punctuated Equilibrium.
the fuck are morels then?!
No gills, no pores: not a mushroom. They're actually called Sac fungi.
A gills or pores criterion would exclude mushrooms such as truffles and chanterelles (which have tubes or teeth).
Chantarelles do not have true gills, that's true. I was just trying to be simple with the description of gills. But you're absolutely right that truffles are not mushrooms either. They're an entirely different type of sporocarp.
Taxonomically speaking, though, they're still basidiomycota, same as the "true" gilled mushrooms. I think any reasonable definition of mushroom someone could come up with is going to be para- or polyphyletic and it doesn't hurt to lump in morels, even if they are in a completely different phylum.
I'm not a biologist or anything, all I know is that mycologists do not consider morels or truffles to be mushrooms.
Mycologists would avoid the term in formal communication entirely; the terms of art would be Basidiocarp for basids and Ascocarp for ascos, or sporocarp generally. In less formal communication my experience has been that mushroom is used as a colloquial stand-in for any sort of macroscopic sporocarp. Linguistic prescriptivism can be fun ("Hey guys - did you a tomato is actually a berry?!") but the stipe-pileus-hymenium model of a mushroom is so narrowly defined I don't know of anyone who could legitimately stick to it without slipping up at some point.
Good to know. I'll just keep my fun facts in the trivia zone.
the "mushroom" is not the organism, it's the fruiting body of some fungi, basically a reproductive appendage. it's like saying "a butt isn't an animal." they're all fungi, but there are so many types and forms of fungi with different reproductive strategies and forms/structures, even within a single species.