Mushroom kingdom. Fungus kingdom. Fungi kingdom. Mushrooms, fungi! What's the difference? The words fungus and mushroom or fungi and mushrooms are often freely substituted for one another. Fungi kingdom is mushroom kingdom and likewise mushroom kingdom is fungi kingdom. Common usage often doesn't really distinguish much between the two terms mushroom and fungi, but there is a difference. Properly speaking a mushroom is a fruitbody of a fungus. When you inspect a wild mushroom or a troop of wild mushrooms, you may never see the underlying fungus at all. It may be hidden under the soil or concealed out of sight inside the bark of a tree or stump from which the mushrooms spring forth. Without the fungus, there would be no mushrooms at all. The fungus multiplies when the mushroom releases spores which land in a nourishing spot and germinate.
Mushroom Art for Sale by Artist C Ribet 18
If conditions are right, the fungus will continue to grow over many many seasons. This fact that the mushroom is just the fruiting body, and not the long-lived organism itself, is why if you are out mushroom picking, and you are very careful to remove only the mushroom and not disturb the underlying fungus body (the mycelium) you should be able to return again to the same spot for more mushroom picking the next season. On the other hand, if in your mushroom picking you carelessly uproot the mushrooms by ripping and pulling out the mycelium, you will likely damage the fungus itself, and you may kill it and never find it in that spot again.
Mushroom Art for Sale by Artist C Ribet 01
Consider for yourself a reasonably distant visual perspective of a wild mushroom. Now imagine removing a troop of 'identical' mushrooms from their surroundings, suspend them from their mycological environment, keep this distant perspective, and visually inspect them in your mind. Although you know that every mushroom is uniquely different from every other, they all appear identical from this perspective. When you remove these mushrooms from their surroundings like this, how closely do you have to examine them to see their differences? …
Mushroom Art for Sale by Artist C Ribet 03
Mushroom kingdom. Fungus kingdom. Fungi kingdom. Mushrooms, fungi! What's the difference? The words fungus and mushroom or fungi and mushrooms are often freely substituted for one another. Fungi kingdom is mushroom kingdom and likewise mushroom kingdom is fungi kingdom. Common usage often doesn't really distinguish much between the two terms mushroom and fungi, but there is a difference. Properly speaking a mushroom is a fruitbody of a fungus. When you inspect a wild mushroom or a troop of wild mushrooms, you may never see the underlying fungus at all. …
Mushroom Art for Sale by Artist C Ribet 02
The fungi kingdom, or mushroom kingdom, makes up its own kingdom because fungi are not animals, and fungi are not plants. Fungi and mushrooms do not photosynthesize and instead derive their energy from the decaying organic matter which supports them. This means they are not dependent upon the sun like most plants. This doesn't mean that all wild mushrooms grow in dark caves, however. For many fungi and wild mushrooms of the fungi kingdom the sun and the warmth it provides are essential to their life cycle. …
Mushroom Art for Sale by Artist C Ribet 04
Whether as a photographer you are taking pictures of people, pictures of plants and animals, or pictures of mushrooms, you will always find that you arrive back home at the end of the day with great hopes and expectations, but you may often be disappointed! The advent of digital photography has made the entire process an order of magnitude easier than it has been traditionally with conventional film photography, but it is by no means certain that you will capture a scene's mood and composition as it appears to you when you are photographing it. …
Mushroom Art for Sale by Artist C Ribet 07
Not many of the original pictures of mushrooms I take will make it all the way to become a mushroom watercolor giclee print. There are so many variables involved in just capturing a fine art mushroom photograph that it is always at least very hard and frequently quite impossible to get everything perfect in the field. Sometimes it seems impossible even to capture a body of reasonable pictures of fungi to begin with, and that is just the first step to obtain the original pictures of the mushrooms from which to ultimately make the final mushroom watercolor giclee prints. …