Gender isn’t really a fungal construct.
Where we have two traditionally recognized genders, male and female, some species of fungi can have thousands of sexes. It sounds confusing, but it’s actually helpful — with so many variations, the fungi can mate with nearly every individual of their species they meet. It must make for a wild singles night.
One species of fungi, Schizophyllum commune, really shines when it comes to gender diversity. The white, fan-shaped mushroom has more than 23,000 different sexual identities, a result of widespread differentiation in the genetic locations that govern its sexual behavior. For humans, and all animals, really, this would never fly, because we’ve evolved a very specific method of reproduction that involves specialized sexual organs to do the mating with and sex cells to carry the genetic information.
Fungi, by contrast, keep it casual. To mate, all a fungus has to do is bump ...
