Folks, is honey a fungus?

  • EmmaGoldman [she/her, comrade/them]M
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    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]
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      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]
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          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.