Even creatures as important and ubiquitous as fungi (and fungi are both) attract comparatively little notice. fungi are everywhere and come in many forms - as mushrooms, moulds, mildews, yeasts and puffballs, to name but a sampling - and they exist in volumes that most of us little suspect. Gather together all the fungi found in a typical hectare of meadowland and you would have 2800 kilograms of the stuff. These are not marginal organisms. Without fungi there would be no potato blights, Dutch elm disease, jock itch or athlete's foot, but also no yogurts or beers or cheeses. A;together about seventy thousand species of fungi have been identified, but it is thought the total number could be as high as 1.8 million. A lot of mycologists work in industry, making cheese and yogurts and the like, so it is hard to say how many are actively involved in research, but we can safely take it that there are more species of fungi to be found than there are people to find them.