The Kingdom Fungi is comprised with eukaryotic (complex cells with a nucleus and organelles) organisms. Most are multicellular, with the exception of single-celled yeast. Fungi are made up of individual feathery filaments called hyphae.

Fungi lack chlorophyll, true stems, and roots. Fungi reproduce by spores, have no vascular tissue and range in form from a single cell to a mass of branched filamentous hyphae that often produce specialized spore producing bodies, as in the case with mushrooms.

Fungi are heterotrophic which means that they can not make their own food but live by decomposing and absorbing organic material from other organisms. This is done either by:

(1) feeding off a live host (parasite) or

(2) feeding on dead organic matter (saprotroph).

Fungi includes: mildews, molds, mushrooms, smuts, rusts, and yeasts.

There are about 100,000 different species of fungi that exist. Some fungi form a symbiotic relationship with algae, benefiting each other. These are known as lichen.

Ascomycota

Basidiomycota

Blastocladiomycota

Chytridiomycota

Entomophthormycota

Glomeromycota

Microsporidia

Neocallimastigomycota

Zygomycota

While climbing up onto the Transcontinental Volcanic Mountains in Michocán, México to see the Monarch butterflies, my guide finds a morel mushroom.

The amanita muscaria is a muscimol mushroom (highly toxic) which is native throughout the temperate and boreal regions of the Norther Hemisphere but has been unintentionally introduced to much of the Southern Hemisphere and well, usually as a symbiont with pine an birch plantations and is not a true cosmopolitan species, (one which extends across all or most of the world. The opposite of cosmopolitan would be endemic.)

Later the same year, while driving along the coast of Oregon, I stop to see a small park and here see another interesting mushroom, a fly argaric.