Are fungi or mushrooms considered plants? I've heard mixed things & thought you'd have some insight about it. Really love ur ivy concepts!!
I’m not going to just say No! and move on because the truth (at least to me) is REALLY INTERESTING. I drew this out, here’s a few billion years summed up with jokes!
Ok. More than 3.5 BYA. You are a bacteria, living in the oceans (which are blood red but that’s a whole Other Thing). You are a cyanobacteria, you live in big gooey colonies with your best friends and you decide “hey, it would be cool if I could do photosynthesis and get even more energy after I eat the sugars” Which was generally considered a Bad Move, because you made oxygen at the end which is super toxic. To all life. Really bad decision (the oceans helped). Instead of wiping out all life by being horrible and toxic, you actually build the ozone layer and make way for a whole bunch of new guys who can use oxygen (oxygenic respiration).
Now we have eukaryotes depicted as Kirby. This is because they are Like That and when they ate cyanobacteria they didn’t always kill them, and over time they just became chloroplasts. Now they can do photosynthesis. The mitochondria was a similar process that happened first. Some plankton still do this and just… have a guy they didn’t eat all the way.
So we have eukaryote Kirby with chloroplasts. That will split to plants and green algae, here’s where the fungi come in!
The last common fungal ancestor was a parasite of a single called green algae or ancestor, things kind of overlap ranges. So you are a closer “cousin” to fungi than fungi are to plants!
I included this whole thing because I study lichens, and two of the partners in that symbiosis are fungi and/or cyanobacteria. That’s crazy! They were parasites and went and did their own thing and some decided to be symbiotic later! With plants too, they are still pathogens and parasites and so on but doesn’t it seem like living inside a thing that originated by eating all your shit would be a good idea. But lichens have lasted more than 400 million years so who am I to say. And plants have a lot of fungal pathogens but may not have made the transition to land without fungi and would not exist without them.
I could go on. This stuff is my main interest for my scientific career (paired down here ofc) hope this was more interesting than just saying “no!” : )
Bonus: mushrooms are ‘fruiting bodies’ or ‘basidia’ of one division of fungi, the basidiomycetes (buh-sid-ee-oh-my-seats)! ascomycetes (ass-co-my-seats) are usually the cup-shaped ones, not technically mushrooms. I think colloquially mushrooms is used for “edible” fungi and ‘toadstools’ are non-edible.
