Fungi, Microbes & the Unseen World Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

Which bacterial disease, carried by the fleas of rats and other rodents, caused the Black Death and later pandemics, and had a vaccine developed against it by Waldemar Haffkine in Bombay in 1897, before a frightening outbreak hit the Indian city of Surat in 1994?

Question 2

Which fungus is behind most fatal mushroom poisonings in the world, a plain greenish-capped species easily mistaken for edible kinds, whose toxins are not destroyed by cooking, cause no symptoms for six to twelve hours, then a brief lull, while the liver and kidneys are silently destroyed?

Question 3

What is the name for the origin, argued for by Lynn Margulis against much early resistance and now firmly accepted, of the energy-releasing and photosynthesising compartments of complex cells: they began as free-living bacteria that were engulfed and kept as permanent lodgers?

Question 4

What is the name for the silent gap between catching an infection and showing the first symptoms, which can last a day or two for a cold, a couple of weeks for chickenpox, or months to years for rabies and the AIDS virus, and during which a person may already be passing it on?

Question 5

Which virus changes its two surface proteins so constantly that a fresh vaccine must be made every year, and every few decades throws up a wholly new combination, often from birds or pigs, that sweeps the world, as in the outbreak of 1918 that killed tens of millions?

Question 6

What is the name for the process by which one bacterium passes a small ring of DNA straight to another through a thin tube, even across different species, spreading useful genes, above all those for resisting antibiotics, through a population far faster than mutation could?

Question 7

What is the name for the sudden population explosion of certain microscopic sea algae, often ones with two tails, that stains coastal water red or brown and releases toxins that build up in mussels and oysters, poisoning the people and seabirds that eat them and killing fish in rafts?

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About Fungi, Microbes & the Unseen World

This quiz is about the living things too small to see, and the fungi that link that world to ours: the fungal kingdom from mushrooms to moulds and yeasts, the bacteria and archaea, the viruses and stranger infectious agents, the single-celled protists and algae, and the pioneers, tools, ferments and gut communities that connect microbes to human life. One hundred questions in five packs, each describing an organism, a group, a structure, a process, a disease agent or a discovery and asking you to name it from four choices of the same kind, then explaining it. Marine plankton such as diatoms belong to the Fish & Sea Life quiz; this is a knowledge quiz, not a picture quiz.

The first pack is the fungal kingdom: the thread body and the mushroom, spores, yeast and mould, the lichen partnership, the fairy ring, the deadly death cap and the storybook fly agaric, the penicillin mould, the ant-hijacking Cordyceps, the truffle, wheat rust and potato blight, ergot and Dutch elm disease, bracket fungi and stinkhorns, the decomposer role, and the chitin that puts fungi closer to animals than to plants.

The second pack is bacteria and archaea: the no-nucleus cell, splitting in two, the spherical form, the Gram stain and the cell-wall mesh, the survival spore, the biofilm, the archaea and the extremophiles, the oxygen-making cyanobacteria, the nitrogen-fixing root bacterium, gene swapping and antibiotic resistance, the laboratory workhorse and the yoghurt bacteria, the gut community, the antibiotic-making soil microbe, the nitrogen cycle, glowing bacteria and quorum sensing.

The third pack is viruses and other infectious agents: what a virus is, its protein shell, the virus that eats bacteria, the backward-copying retrovirus, influenza and the common cold and the coronavirus, eradicated smallpox, the vaccine and herd immunity, the gene-free prion and the tiny viroid, the incubation period, the animal reservoir and spillover, polio, antiviral drugs, tuberculosis, plague and malaria.

The fourth pack is protists and the microbial menagerie: the leftover-group protist, the shapeshifting amoeba, the slipper and the ciliates, the half-plant euglena, the slime mould, the rolling colony Volvox, food-grade Spirulina, laboratory agar, the chalk-shelled forams, the red tide, the parasites Giardia, Trypanosoma and Toxoplasma, the fungus-like water moulds, a flagellum model alga, the dinoflagellates, pack-hunting myxobacteria, the deep rock biosphere and the Winogradsky column.

The fifth pack is people, tools and ferments: Leeuwenhoek, Pasteur and Koch, pasteurisation, Fleming and Jenner, the Petri dish and Koch's rules, the DNA-copying reaction and CRISPR, fermentation itself, yoghurt and idli-dosa batter, Japanese koji and the kombucha culture, probiotics and the stool transplant, the cow's rumen, the Great Oxidation Event and the bacterial origin of our cell powerhouses.

The wrong answers are always other organisms or terms of the same kind. About a quarter of the questions carry a neutral photograph of an agar plate, a microscope, lab glassware or a cut loaf, chosen because it names no organism and so cannot point to any option. Facts have been checked against standard reference works.