I mean, the animal part seems intuitive, however I’d like to hear the whole story…
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>the animal part seems intuitive
What do you mean by that? That it makes sense that fungi are separate from animals but not plants?
Because fungi are actually *closer* to animals than they are to plants.
There’s a lot of reason that fungi are their own thing, but the tl;dr is that they share a few traits with plants and a bunch with animals. Here’s some of them:
First off, their cells have cell *walls* like plants have instead of cell *membranes* like animals do. Walls are hard structures and membranes are soft. But that’s basically where the differences with animals end.
Like animals, fungi secrete digestive enzymes and can not photosynthesize. Fungi get their energy from eating other stuff. Just like animals. The exact mechanics of it are of course different than most of us animals. But plants just…don’t do that. Even carnivorous plants tend to get some or most of their energy from photosynthesis.
And then at a molecular level, they are a lot like us. When a plant stores energy it does it in the form of starch. Fungi and animals store it as something called *glycogen.*
And remember those cell walls I mentioned before? In fungi, those are made of something called *chitin* which is the same thing that bug shells are made of. Animals create chitin all the time. But plant cell walls are made of *cellulose*, something almost no animal creates.
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