Mushrooms, Fungi and Toadstools: What’s The Difference?
While showing my younge
st sister some mushrooms, I made a comment about the “interesting looking fungi”. She looked at me confused and said, “fungi? What’s that, I thought you said it was a mushroom…” Call me surprised-because as a 5 year old, she knows everything about everything and reminds me of that-but also, I thought for sure I used the word ‘fungi’ around her enough for her to understand it. Realistically, the words mushroom and fungi are used so interchangeably that their true meaning can escape us unless looking directly into the matter.
Here is a simple explanation of the difference.
Mushrooms are the beautiful, delicate, lumpy, bumpy ‘fruiting body’ we see growing out of the ground or wood-they are the reproductive structures of fungi.
Fungi is the entire organism. The mycelium (roots) and the mushroom (fruit). Some fungi do not ever produce fruiting bodies (such as bread molds, or my husband’s toe fungi).
If we were talking about apple trees, a mushroom would be equivalent to an apple, while not an organism on it’s own, but part of one. The entire tree would be equivalent to fungi, the entire organism. Therefore, all mushrooms are also fungi, but not all fungi produce mushrooms.
And Toadstools? Most commonly this is a slang term for poisonous mushrooms-often referring to the brightly colored Amanita species.