Protists & Fungi Experiments & Videos

If you have ever seen mold growing on an old loaf of bread or eaten a mushroom, you have encountered a fungus. Fungi (that’s the plural of fungus) are a group of organisms, or living things, that are all around us. Mold on bread and mushrooms on pizza are both examples of fungi.

Fungi have an important job. They help break down other material, so that living things are able to grow in soil. This helps make nutritious foods for other organisms. Fungi are needed for life!

Do you think mushrooms are plants? Scientists used to think that all fungi were plants. Now they know that there are some very important different between these two groups of organisms. One of the most important differences is that plants are autotrophic. This means that they can make their own food, just by using the sunlight. Fungi can’t do this. They have to “eat” other living things in order to get the energy they need. This is called being heterotrophic.

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If your kitchen is like most kitchens, you probably have cabinets for cups and pots and pans, along with drawers for silverware and cooking utensils.  You might also have a drawer you call the “junk drawer.”  The things in this drawer aren’t actually “junk.”  If they were, you’d throw them away.  Instead, things usually get put here because they just don’t fit anywhere else.

You might be surprised to learn that the system for classifying organisms has its own “junk drawer.”  It’s called the protist kingdom.  Its members, like the contents of your kitchen junk drawer, are important, but don’t fit nicely in one of the other kingdoms.

Broadly, protists can be classified as animal-like, plant-like, or fungus-like.  It is important to remember that being “animal-like” does not make a protist an animal.  Such and organism, like plant-like or fungus-like protists, are members of an entirely different group of living things.

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This type of slime Physarum Polycephalum is called the “many-headed slime”. This slime likes shady, cool, moist areas like you’d find in decaying logs and branches. Slime (or slime mold) is a word used to define protists that use spores to reproduce. (Note: Slime used to be classified as fungi.)

Real slime lives on microorganisms that inhabit dirt, grass, dead leaves, rotting logs, tropical fruits, air conditioners, gutters, classrooms and laboratories. Slime can grow to an area of several square meters.

Slime shows curious behaviors. It can follow a maze, reconnect itself when chopped in half, and predict whether an environment is good to live in or not. Scientists have battled with the ideas that at first glance, slime appears to be simply a “bag of amoebae”, but upon further study, seem to behave as if they have simple brains, like insects.

Slime can be either a plasmodial slime, a bag of cytoplasm containing thousands of individual nuclei, or a cellular slime which usually stays as individual unicellular protists until a chemical signal is released, causing the cells to gather and acts as one organism.
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Fungi and protists, including mold, moss, yeast, and mushrooms, are found all around us. One common group of fungi is mold. Mold, like all fungi, are heterotrophs, which means they rely on other living things for their energy. This is different than an autotroph like a plant, which gets its energy from the sun.

Mold commonly grows on bread, getting food from this source. What do you think makes mold grow? Being in a dark place? Being exposed to moisture? Something else? The scientific method is a series of steps some scientists use to answer question and solve problems. To conduct an experiment based on the scientific method, you must have a control sample, which has nothing done to it, and several experimental samples, which have changes made to them. You can then observe results in the experimental sample to see how your changes to them affect results.

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