In this video we're going to take a look at what fungi and protists are, and at a couple of the diseases that they can cause. Fungi are eukaryotic organisms, just like plants and animals. But unlike plants and animals, fungi can be either unicellular or multicellular.
For example, yeast is a unicellular fungi that were used to make bread rice, while mushrooms are multicellular fungi. Again the multicellular ones. have long thread-like structures called hyphae, which come out of the main body and spread through the soil. Occasionally though, these hyphae spread over plants, or even penetrate human skin and cause disease.
The hyphae can also produce spores, which spread easily and grow into new fungi. An example of a fungal disease is rose black spot, which causes purple or black spots to form on the leaves of plants. especially roses, hence the name.
As the fungus does more and more damage, the leaves can start to turn yellow and drop off. As you can imagine, this reduces the plant's ability to photosynthesise and so they don't grow so well. The rose black spot fungus normally spreads by being transported either in the water or by the wind and to treat it we can either chop off all of the infected leaves or spray the plant with fungicides which kill any fungus.
If you choose to chop off the leaves though, then be sure to destroy them so that the fungi can't spread to any other plants. Just like fungi, protists are also eukaryotes, and can be either single or multi-celled organisms, however the large majority of them are single-celled or unicellular. Some of them are my class's parasites.
which means that they live on or inside other organisms, and they survive at that other organism's expense. Protists are often transported by vectors, which are other organisms, like insects, that transport the protists between different host organisms. Importantly though, vectors don't get the disease themselves. To show you what we mean, let's consider malaria.
Malaria is caused by parasitic protest, which means that it needs a host such as a human or other animal to survive. Importantly though, it's transported between hosts by mosquitoes. It works like this.
When a mosquito feeds on an animal that's already been infected, and it sucks out some blood, it can also suck up some of those malaria parasites. Then when another healthy animal comes along, like a person, and the mosquito feeds on that animal, the parasites get transferred, at which point we would say that the proteists have spread to a new host. Whenever humans catch malaria, we get really bad fevers and headaches, and just generally feel dreadful. Often these symptoms go away for a while, but they keep on coming back, so we call them recurrent episodes.
In some cases, they can even be fatal. The best way to prevent diseases like this is to stop the vectors from spreading the protists in the first place. For example, we could reduce the number of mosquitoes in the area by destroying their breeding sites, or directly killing them with insecticides.
Another option would be to stop them from feeding on us by using mosquito nets or mosquito repellent. And that's all for this video. If you found this useful, then please do give us a like and subscribe and we'll see you next time