okay fungus now this first slide lets us know just how large fungus can actually get so we don't typically think of fungi as being that large but they really are so you know this says that we typically think that you know California Redwoods or blue whales are very very large and certainly they are but the largest living organism is the honey mushroom and if you look at its picture and I'm sorry if you look at its picture right here this whole white area here is the top of this fungus it's like a Gigantor mushroom and the scientific name for it is our Marilia a story ie it covers more than 1500 football fields so you can imagine the size of it and they think that is about 2,400 years old now it's protected so it's it's safe but this is a huge fungus and this just sort of lays the groundwork that these things can get quite large and they can also be far-reaching all right the study of fungus is called my ecology if you are a mycologist you study fungi and they are a very specialized group and they're the only ones that can really tell just by looking some of the species that are poisonous so if there's ever any doubt about anything being poisonous only a mycologist can actually give you that information now they're all eukaryotic there's not going to be any fungi that carry out photosynthesis they also mostly are multicellular however in this group we're in this kingdom we do have our unicellular yeast so most of them are going to be multicellular and with yeast being the only unicellular all right there's been about 70,000 species of fungus that have been named but they think they're as many as 1.5 million out there and the rest of them have not either been discovered or named a lot of them come out of the rainforest but because some of them are so obscure it's hard to locate and name them all now members of the kingdom fungi are going to fall into one of three groups in here you can see we have a common ancestor and then our branch comes up and then it goes to the right and the left on the Left we have some pretty ancient and very old fungi into the right we have that more like the mushrooms and yeast is on the far right as well so they're a lot more related here and we'll talk about why in just a little while than the two on the left the kids are very very old and and this is a type of mold so we have our single-celled yeast we also have our mold now true mold by definition is any fungus that grows on a surface so we have our moles and then we have our true fungi now for a very very long time scientists put fungi in the plant department but there are three main reasons they cannot be in the plant department and if they have their own kingdom first of all they don't contain chloroplasts if you look at them on a cellular basis there's no chloroplast and obviously no chloroplasts no chlorophyll so they're heterotrophs they're not autotrophs also in order to be in the plant kingdom you have to have true roots stems and leaves and fungus do not have true roots stems and leaves they do have something that anchors them to the ground but it's not a true root also plant cell walls are not made of cellulose if you remember cellulose is a starch and that's the way that plants make up their cell walls and cellulose was what we couldn't digest it was actually moved through us as fiber well with fungi they don't have cellulose as their starch and their cell wall it's called chitin and chitin also as a starch so it's glucose units hooked together but it's a lot more complex it's a lot tougher polysaccharide than cellulose is all right fungi are going to get their nutrients by absorbing organic molecules from their environment they are decomposers they don't take their digestion internally or they don't take their food internally to digest so they are extracellular digesters and the type of nutrition is called absorptive nutrition because they're going to release these enzymes into the environment and they are going to absorb them back into the body of the fungus so anytime they're on top of a food source they're going to digest that food extracellular lee and then bring it into the cell wall now saprophytic fungi saprophytic is a type of decomposer and what they're doing is they break down only dead and decaying material so some of these fungi especially are parasitic fungi they're not breaking down dead in decaying material because if they're living on you that you know what they're eating off of is not dead but we do have saprophytic fungi very very very important decomposers in the environment and as you can see here this is called a bracket fungus it's a very very very large type of basidiomycota which is a mushroom and it is breaking down these organic materials now the organic materials that they're breaking down are going to be like carbon and nitrogen and they put these back into the food webs so that plants can take up the nitrogen and they can you know they can grow so they're very very important decomposers for recycling nutrients all right parasitic fungi absorbed nutrients from living cells of other organisms now this is also true then these are would be the ones that are not so prophetic there are some parasitic fungi that produce some specialized hyphy now I'm going to show you what - looks like in just a minute but a - is a long slender filament that that makes up the body of the fungus and some of these long filaments can actually grow into a host tissue that type of high fee is called a historian or historia and they grow into the tissue and they absorb the nutrients an example of that is a wraith robot hrus the parasitic usually they're very Pierce that at the plants but if they form a historia the historia is a type of hyphy that can penetrate living organisms to break down their the food and absorb back the nutrients Oh