Chapter 21 

 MARINE FUNGI 



Among students of fungi and of marine biology generally, a 

 knowledge of marine fungi is largely non-existent. The under- 

 lying reasons for this strange state of affairs are not apparent in 

 view of the enormous volume of work dealing with marine life 

 that has been accomplished. Biologists quite generally concede 

 that the ocean is the ancestral home of life and that the progenitors 

 of present-day land animals and plants came from the ocean. 

 With similar reasoning fungi may be assumed to have originated 

 within the ocean. It might be anticipated, moreover, that marine 

 fungi would constitute favorable materials for studies on phylog- 

 eny and on the place which such organisms occupy in the 

 economy of life in oceans. 



Terrestrial fungi and bacteria are well known to be responsible 

 for the decomposition of organic debris of all sorts, and it may 

 reasonably be assumed therefore that organisms of these types 

 play a similar role in the ocean. This assumption is not supported, 

 however, by any body of observational and experimental data of 

 appreciable magnitude. Similarly, relatively little appears to be 

 known about the activities and life histories of any species of 

 marine fungi and bacteria, although marine bacteria have been 

 studied somewhat intensively and extensively. 



Students of the phytogeny of the fungi regard the Archimy- 

 cetes as the ancestral and the most primitive group. Among 

 Archimvcetes the asexual spores and both kinds of gametes or 

 those of one sex only may be motile, whereas among present-day, 

 higher, terrestrial Phvcomvcetes and anions all Ascomvcetes and 

 all Basidiomvcetes motility is lacking. This fact might be inter- 

 preted to indicate that all these present-day, non-motile forms 

 were derived in a monophyletic line from terrestrial progenitors 

 after the land habit had once become established. It is conceiv- 

 able too that the higher marine fungi of the present day may 



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