Zygomycota Case Study

1. How do fungi obtain food? Once obtained, how is the method that fungi use to digest food similar to how animals digest food? How is it different?
a. Fungi obtain their food by absorption from their surroundings such as soil, living and dead plant/animal material. Animals digest food by consuming them and digest them through their digestive systems in their bodies. Fungi on the other hand, excrete digestive enzymes onto the food and digest them outside of their system. Then they use hyphae to absorb the food.
2. For many people, when they find a spot of mold (Rhizopus, for example) on the surface of some bread or cheese, they simply cut off the moldy spot and incorrectly assume that the bread or cheese is now fine. What anatomical part of the mold were they seeing on the surface of the bread? And explain why just cutting off the mold spot that you see is NOT going to get rid of the mold?
a. What they see is just the reproductive part of the fungi. In actuality, the hyphae are spread through the bread and form groups of mycelium and we cannot see it with our naked eye. Therefore, cutting off the surface of the bread is not going to get rid of the mold.
3. In both Zygomycota and Ascomycota, the production of
Common examples of basidiomycota fungi are mushrooms, puffballs, stinkhorn, and yeast. They are normally composed of filaments of hyphae and reproduce sexually with club-shaped spore-bearing organ called basidium. One specific example of a basidiomycota fungus is the oyster mushroom. Oyster mushrooms tend to grow on hardwood or conifers in shelf-like clusters. It is commonly spread throughout North America and can kill bacteria and nematodes with high efficiency. It has a size range from 4 cm to 15 cm, fan shaped, mostly smooth flat cap, and colored pale brown to dark brown. It also has white-ish gill that runs down the stem, and tastes mild but with a distinctive