Fungi, The 3rd Realm
Mycology, the study of fungi, a group that includes the mushrooms and yeasts. (Britannica, 2002)
​
​
​
They’re in your food, in your lungs they’re on your skin, they are on each thing you touch and each place you go.
They are a single interconnected network. [...] Could be described as a third mode of life.[...] This entire web of life is connected, and its connected through fungi. They shaped our world and hold the key for the future. [...] Many people think of them as plants but in fact fungi are much more closely related to animals than they are to plants. Like animals they have to eat other organisms (Talas and Nasht, 2018).
[…] Fungi grow from the tips of their filaments called ‘hyphae’ which forms the ‘mycelia’ which is the body of the fungi (Ahmadijan, Moore and Alexapoulos, 2020). The mushrooms are however, only the fruiting body of the fungi. “They are just tip of the iceberg. The main part of the fungus is the massive web of filaments which forms the mycelium” (Talas and Nasht, 2018).
Unlike animals, the body of the fungus is constantly changing shape in a relentless search for food. It can keep spreading they can recycle the material not useful and use all that material to grow somewhere else. So it can actually migrate in the environment dpending on whether it can find food or not. [...] During the billion years of evolution, fungi became the masters of survival (Talas and Nasht, 2018).