Many people in our part of the world think that plants and animals they see around them – trees, dogs, cats, snakes, insects, etc. – are the only living things that exist.

This is because they interact mostly with these plants and animals daily, and may not be familiar with other living things that exist around them. Most of us have encountered mouldy bread and kenkey on the kitchen cabinet in our homes. These colourful moulds are fungi.

Fungi are neither plants nor animals. They have unique characteristics that place them into their own fungi kingdom.

Fungi are ubiquitous, so they are encountered in terrestrial, freshwater and marine environments. Besides their ubiquitous nature, fungi are globally distributed.

Remarkably, fungi have the knack to easily and successfully colonise and grow on any substrate that provides them the basic nutrients. That’s why we find them grow on clothes, shoes, painted walls, card boxes, wooden panels in bathrooms, kitchen, etc.

They are successful colonisers because they have the ability to digest their food using an array of enzymes they secrete. After digesting their food, fungi then absorb the released nutrients for growth and other activities like spore production.

There are reportedly an estimated 1.5 million fungal species, of which 80,000 to 120,000 have been completely identified and named. Some notable examples of fungi are the bakers’ yeast, Saccharomycescerevisiae, which is used in bread making; Penicillium from which the first antibiotic, Penicillin, was discovered by Alexander Fleming in 1928; and the Dermatophytes, including Trichophyton, Microsporum and Epidermophyton that cause superficial fungal infections of the skin popularly called the ringworm. Not only that. There are groups of fungi that form fruiting bodies that solely produce millions of microscopic spores.

Mushrooms are familiar examples of such fruiting bodies we encounter in our backyards and in the forests, especially on felled, decaying trees. Like the seeds of plants, fungi propagate their kind when they eject their spores, which are dispersed by wind currents, making them airborne. Incredibly, we inhale these airborne fungal spores from the time we are born till we take our final breathe on earth!

Fungi play an important ecological role. Just as they colonise and decompose bread and kenkey on the kitchen cabinet, fungi, together with bacteria, decompose dead plants and animals in our environment.

Through this decay process, excess nutrients that are not absorbed by the fungi are released into the environment for living plants to take up through their roots.

And so without fungi (and bacteria), we will be confronted with overwhelming piles of dead plants and animals that litter our surroundings. In effect, fungi help to “clean up” our environments through an efficient, elaborate recycling mechanism that allows locked up nutrients in dead plants and animals to be released into the energy chain.

In many ways, fungi have been of immense benefit to humankind. They are a fascinating piece of the web of life that inhabits our planet. They are our other living folks! Future articles will shed more light on fungis immeasurable impact on industry, agriculture, medicine, and even folklore.

The author is a fungal biologist, and lecturer at the Department of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology, University of Cape Coast