Transcript

The largest living thing in the world is not an elephant, or a giant redwood tree, or even a whale shark....

The prize for being the biggest organism goes to...

...a honey mushroom.

honey mushroom

It lives in Oregon, USA.

It might look like lots of small individual mushrooms, but actually they are all part of one huge organism.

The honey mushroom is thought to be over 2000 years old, and it covers an area of 9 kilometres squared.

That's about the size of 15 football fields.

The honey mushroom is a type of fungus.

Fungi are not plants and they're not animals.

fungi

Fungi are classified in their own kingdom.

kingdom

There are around 1.5 million different species, or types, of fungi.

species

They include mushrooms...

mushrooms

Toadstools...

toadstools

And moulds.

moulds

These structures are the fruit of a fungus.

Using a microscope, we can see that they contain millions of tiny spores.

spores

In the same way that seeds can grow into new plants, spores can grow into new fungi.

A giant puffball mushroom contains around 7 trillion spores.

giant puffball

They are spread by rain and wind.

Many fungi rely on their spores to travel to new places, but the honey mushroom has a different technique of spreading.

Again, looking under a microscope, we can see that it is made up of millions of tiny threads, called mycelium.

mycelium

The mycelia grow along the ground and up inside trees.

They steal water and nutrients from the trees, feeding the honey mushroom so it can produce even more mycelia.

The invaded trees are slowly killed, but the honey mushroom marches on.

It's the largest living organism on the planet, and it's still growing!

fungi
mushrooms
spores
mycelium

Video info

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Kingdoms

Plant classification