Folks, is honey a fungus?

    • BodyBySisyphus [he/him]
      ·
      1 year ago

      A gills or pores criterion would exclude mushrooms such as truffles and chanterelles (which have tubes or teeth).

      • EmmaGoldman [she/her, comrade/them]M
        ·
        1 year ago

        Chantarelles do not have true gills, that's true. I was just trying to be simple with the description of gills. But you're absolutely right that truffles are not mushrooms either. They're an entirely different type of sporocarp.

        • BodyBySisyphus [he/him]
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          Taxonomically speaking, though, they're still basidiomycota, same as the "true" gilled mushrooms. I think any reasonable definition of mushroom someone could come up with is going to be para- or polyphyletic and it doesn't hurt to lump in morels, even if they are in a completely different phylum.

            • BodyBySisyphus [he/him]
              ·
              1 year ago

              Mycologists would avoid the term in formal communication entirely; the terms of art would be Basidiocarp for basids and Ascocarp for ascos, or sporocarp generally. In less formal communication my experience has been that mushroom is used as a colloquial stand-in for any sort of macroscopic sporocarp. Linguistic prescriptivism can be fun ("Hey guys - did you a tomato is actually a berry?!") but the stipe-pileus-hymenium model of a mushroom is so narrowly defined I don't know of anyone who could legitimately stick to it without slipping up at some point.