So, was getting caught up with the last few XKCDs and came across this here. After some further reading (for instance, this here) turns out animals and fungi had a common ancestor and branched off from plants about 1.1 billion years ago, and that animals separated from that line only later.
I’m sure lots of you all already knew this, but for those who didn’t, I thought you might be interested.
And I never cease to be amazed at the breadth of things one can learn from XKCD!
Yeah, I knew it intellectually, but I still have to correct myself from saying ‘plants’ or ‘vegetables’ in everyday conversation about mushrooms every once in a while.
Someone once showed me one of those lists of ‘cute misconceptions kids have about stuff’ containing the statement “mushrooms look like umbrellas because they grow in wet places”.
I actually think that’s more or less true. Of course not all mushrooms do look like umbrellas, but it’s probably true that the standard mushroom shape is an evolutionary adaptation that keeps the spores protected from falling rain.
I found this out recently, and I was so amazed I was texting people I know, starting off with “HEY GUESS WHAT OMG.”
That explains the tiny cries of pain I heard coming from the cutting board when I sliced up mushrooms for my spaghetti sauce the other day.
Along the same line, lobe-finned fish such as coelacanths and lungfishes are more closely related to humans than to ray-finned fish. Echinoderms such as starfishes and sea urchins are also more closely related to humans than to invertibrates.
So does this mean vegetarians can’t eat mushrooms?
Oddly, Pepper Mill and I were discussing the taxonomy of fungi recently (really!) I held that they were part of the plant kingdom, so this comes as a surprise to me.
I was going to add that “this explains slime molds”, which can congregate and move from place to place when food gets short, or they need to reproduce. But apparently, slime molds are no longer considered fungi. Slime mold - Wikipedia
It’s all getting very H.P. Lovecraft.
For what it’s worth, the US Department of Agriculture does consider mushrooms to be vegetables. Which makes sense, it’s not like vegetable is a scientific category.
Taxonomy is no longer really as simple as the old Linnaean Kingdoms anymore. In fact, the idea of a Kingdom has become so biologically meaningless (Kingdoms often do not accurately reflect common ancestry) that many biologists have backed off the idea altogether and go with Domains. As far as we know, there are three Domains - Bacteria, Archaea, and Eukarya (with the nascent possibility of a fourth - some studies have unearthed very unusual DNA sequences from gut microbiota which do not conform with any of the three known Domains - but this is still very much unproven.)
Fungi, animals, and plants are all in Domain Eukarya. Domain Eukarya is most frequently subdivided into four (or sometimes five) supergroups, each reflecting common ancestry. Animals, fungi, and slime molds are all in Unikonta, while plants, green algae, and red algae are all in Archaeplastida - very distantly related indeed. Interestingly, most of what we used to group in Kingdom Protista (the microbial eukaryotes) are not related to each other at all. It’s these organisms that monkey up the idea of Kingdoms. Protista was always a catch-all group which did not reflect evolutionary history. There were even false groups WITHIN this false group, such as the algaes. these were all grouped together due to the fact that they all did photosynthesis in one form or another, even though they did it in very different ways. Turns out that they are not really closely related to each other, and are spread out among the other supergroups like crazy.
Here is a version of the Eukaryotic phylogenetic tree. This stuff is not remotely settled, and there are lots of arguments over the finer structure, but you can get the idea of how diffuse and diverse evolution has been. It’s certainly not divisible into a few convenient Kingdoms. They call Archaeplastida “Plantae” in this tree.
They can grow on barren rock, they are biologically immortal, and their colonies can span many miles. Some of them are able to infect humans, others produce utterly alien dream like states when eaten. Tentacles or not, we better keep a close eye on them.
The Fungus Amongus!!!
Not sure how we’re going to explain this now.
When deciding whether or not to eat fungi, just remember Terry Pratchett’s simple rules:
1: All fungi are edible.
2: Some fungi are only edible once.
One of my favorite comparisons is that trout are more closely related to people than they are to sharks.
We QI nerds know that! There is no such thing as a fish; a salmon is more closely related to a camel than it is to a hagfish.
Yup, fungi are eukaryotes. That’s why it’s so difficult to invent anti-fungal medications (as opposed to antibiotics) and the truly effective ones tend to do nasty stuff to your kidneys and liver.
Another fun fact: Seaweed and kelp are algae, not plants.
Yet another fun fact: Flowering plants didn’t become dominant until after the dinosaurs went extinct.
To paraphrase myself from a recent thread: salps are a sea creature that resemble jellyfish. They are much more closely related to humans though, being chordates.
If I were a fish, I’d deny any link to hagfish, too.
These days, green algae are considered part of the Plantae and thus are plants. Kelp are brown algae and not part of the Plantae.
Flowering plants became dominant over conifers and ferns by about the middle of the Cretaceous, a good 30 million years before the dinosaurs became extinct.
It sort of is. ‘Vegetable kingdom’ is a common synonym for Plantae (it’s a bit archaic, but still in use.)
Ministries of agriculture and food categorise things for their own reasons (e.g. crustaceans and molluscs as ‘fish’; carrots and rhubarb as ‘fruit’).
I was going to say that these industry definitions are not taxonomic, but they are; they just use a different hierarchy that isn’t based on biology, but rather, on consumption.
Question just occurred to me: was the most recent common ancestor of modern fungi and animals a fungus?
Just to make good use of my username, here are the animal-fungi from Lovecraft.
