 Okay, I have four stories for you about how cool fungi are. And this first story is one that you already know. If you partook in the Sex and Parasites lecture, then you learned about this fungus, which basically causes a fly, hijacks a fly's brain, causes the fly to climb up to a very high location at dusk, and hang by its proboscis from a high location and explode. When it explodes, fungal spores get spread all over. Unbelievably fantastic strategy for survival for the fungus, not so much for the fly. That's one. How about this guy? You know, I think this is a wasp. It kind of looks like an ant to me, but this wasp got its brain taken over by a fungus. This is the fungus that's growing inside of its brain and got the fungus, let the wasp do its thing, until the wasp got to a point where the fungus was like, okay, now I'm ready to send my spores out into the world, and then the spores burst out and the wasps was like, there's aliens coming out of me. Sad story, what do I do? A little too late for you, man. A little too late. Likens. Likens are a symbiotic, I don't know if we could really call it symbiotic, because the fact is a lichen is a fungus that has algae, photosynthetic algae inside the lichen net of hyphae, and they're hijacked, and the hyphae are like telling the algae, dude, we're starving, you're starving, because the hyphae steal the algae's sugar. So the algae thinks, why can't I make enough food? I'm photosynthesizing like mad. Everything I do, I just try to make more sugar, and where is it all going? And the lichen, the fungus part is like, this is awesome, keep going man, you're starving, you're starving, and eats all this sugar. Now I suppose you could argue that the algae could never survive in some of these environments that lichens can survive in, so algae are able to live in different places because of this relationship with the fungus. Lichens often are mistaken for mosses, but if you look at them really closely, you'll see that they aren't plant-like, they look fungus-y, and we can take a look at some of them hopefully in lab. You'll find them all over the place, lichens are pretty common. The last one that has a coolness factor that's actually like beyond the coolness factor is a kind of fungus called mycorrhizae. So I would, these things, the world would not, plants, plants would not exist without mycorrhizal fungi associated with their roots. These fungus critters, this hyphae, that associate with the roots of plants help the plants absorb nutrients from the soil, and they've done research where they clean all the fungus out of the soil and plant the bean in the soil, and the bean's like, I'm starving, and nobody knows why, like what happened to that thing? They allow the fungus to exist in the soil, they don't like sterilize the soil, and then the bean plant grows just fine. So this is a really important flavor of fungus that enables most land plants to have roots to do their thang. You know, I don't know why this isn't on my list, but there's a group of cholesterol-lowering drugs called statins, those are produced by, or the original chemical that was discovered by medical researchers, that original chemical was made by a fungus. And in fact, penicillin, we talked about this earlier, penicillin is a substance that was made by a fungus to protect itself from bacteria, and therefore is an antibacterial substance that we definitely take advantage of. So fungi are really important to us. I mean, even just going to our unicellular friends, the yeasts, who help us make bread and alcohol, and you knew you were drinking yeast, Pete, didn't you, when you were drinking alcohol? Take care of your brains, dog-pounds. We'll see you in the next lecture when we get to start talking about animals.