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Small Animals - The fungi play a major role in recycling essential elements from dead organic matter. The fungi often do this in association with many other organisms in the soil: bacteria, insects, worms, amoebae, nematodes, and small animals. Many of the fungi associated with mycorrhizae have mushroom fruit bodies. Others have a variety of fruit bodies above ground and below ground. The major point is that the members of the natural system are all connected. When the connections begin to be broken, the system will suffer. You can kill soil. You can kill a forest. You can kill many living things that depend on a healthy forest. How? By breaking connections.

See brilliantly colored minute mushrooms were fruit bodies of a fungus were recycling elements in a symplastless log. (Source TREE ANATOMY, SHIGO, 1994, pg 86).

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