“The Structure of Fungi” Discovery Education Video Transcript
Compared to the other kingdoms of living things, the basic structure of fungi is rather peculiar. The fungal body consists mainly of threads called hyphae that search out and digest food and that can give rise to special organs used for spore production called fruiting bodies like the microscopic example pictured here. Hyphae grow very rapidly from a single spore and as they branch out tangled mass called a mycelium is formed. Mycelia can be enormous in size; larger than a thousand soccer fields and have been observed to grow as much as a kilometer or six tenths of a mile each day searching for food. The mushrooms we find growing in woods and lawns are actually complex spore-making structures that arise from a large underground mycelium In fact looking at the stalk of this mushroom we can see that it is composed of thousands of threads of hyphae very tightly packed together in some fungi hyphae threads are divided up into individual cells like porous cell walls that allow mitochondria, ribosomes, and even nuclei to pass from cell to cell. But in other fungi, hyphae form coenocytes threads that are threads that are not divided up into individual cells and are often filled with hundreds of nuclei.