As you know, for quite some 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 “System of Nature”, paying attention to the signs that bring mushrooms to animals. But only in the 70-80s of the last century did this separation finally happen. These creatures of nature, by virtue of their structure and characteristics, have signs that bring mushrooms closer to animals and at the same time with plants (roughly speaking, they are both). Let's consider some of them.
Similarity to plants
Why did scientists take these organisms to plants for so long, because there are obvious signs that bring mushrooms to animals? And this happened because they have characteristic properties that allowed them to be attributed to the plant kingdom :
- They, for example, cannot move independently, like almost all representatives of the animal world. Although this is not entirely true (underground, the mycelium, spreading, conquers new spaces of the substrate, but this movement can be associated with constant growth).
- By the way, mushrooms, like plants, have been growing all their lives. Unlike animals that grow to a certain size and stop growing. So in this, there is no similarity of mushrooms and animals.
- Many mushrooms reproduce by spores. Hats, for example, can produce up to several tens of billions of spores in their lives. True, most of these disputes die. But if they fall into a favorable environment, then they reproduce. Spore plants also come in. And also fungi can multiply by dividing the mycelium, sometimes even by several of its cells. This is enough for a new mycelium to develop, capable of giving life to new fruiting bodies, spores and, therefore, offspring.
- Mushrooms feed mainly by absorption. And this also brings them closer to plants.
Differences in the origin of mushrooms and plants
But scientists, meanwhile, have also revealed that fungi and plants come from different evolutionary branches - groups of the oldest microscopic organisms that once lived in the oceans. Therefore, they still differ both evolutionarily and genetically.
At the cellular level
The cells of plants, animals and fungi are different in structure. Mushrooms lack the ability to photosynthesis; they do not have chlorophyll in the cells, as in plants. But in the composition of their cells there is chitin, characteristic of representatives of some animals (for example, arthropods, in which it is an important element for creating a shell or an external skeleton). This factor, of course, brings mushrooms closer to animals.
Metabolism
Mushrooms are able, like animals, to store glycogen (carbohydrates). They can also remove the final products of their metabolism from the body. This also makes them look like representatives of the fauna.
Nutrition Methods
Mushrooms themselves do not synthesize organic matter. They are heterotrophs, that is, they consume them in a prepared form, on the contrary, utilizing them to inorganic compounds using enzymes that they can secrete (saprophytes). This also shows signs that bring mushrooms closer to animals that absorb organic food. Symbiotic fungi live due to close interaction with trees (sometimes it’s even difficult to figure out who is who in the intricacies of mycelium and small root hairs).
There are fungi parasitizing on other organisms - plants and animals, feeding at their expense and sometimes even killing their master. At the same time, a mushroom (for example, a tinder fungus) can live for a long time on a dead tree, decomposing its organic tissues and using them for food. There are even predator mushrooms. They feed on animals: amoeba and nematodes, trapping them with an adhesive surface on their gifs. It is also characteristic of fungi that in the process of metabolism they produce urea, as in many animals.
Summary
Summing up, it can be noted that mushrooms are a special kingdom in nature, consisting of countless species: from huge hat-shaped mushrooms to the smallest mold and yeast, which are not always noticeable with an unmanned microscope. All of them are descendants of ancient eukaryotic microorganisms that once lived in aquatic environments billions of years ago.
Some properties are related by mushrooms to plants (in fact, many scientists preferred to think until the end of the twentieth century). This is the inability to move independently, and growth throughout life, and suction nutrition. And heterotrophic nutrition brings them closer to the animal kingdom, as well as the presence of chitin in the membranes of their cells, the ability to accumulate carbohydrates, the formation of urea and its excretion during metabolism. All this makes mushrooms at the same time similar to plants and animals.