2.5 Communicable Disease 4 - Protists and Fungi

Question 1

How is fungi different to plant and animal cells?

Answer 1

Fungi can either be unicellular or multicellular

Question 2

What is an example of a unicellular fungi?

Answer 2

Yeast

Question 3

What is an example of a multicellular fungi?

Answer 3

Mushrooms - they have long thread-like structures called hyphae which come out of the main body and spread through the soil

Question 4

How does fungi infect plants and humans?

Answer 4

Sometimes, the thread-like structures called hyphae spread over plants or even penetrate human skin and cause disease.
The hyphae can also produce spores which spread easily and grow into new fungi

Question 5

What is an example of a fungal disease?

Answer 5

Rose black spot/Athlete’s foot

Question 6

What happens to a plant once they are infected with rose black spot? (2)

Answer 6

• Causes purple or black spots to form on the leaves of plants (especially roses)
  -As the fungi starts to do more damage, the leaves will start to look yellow and ‘drop off’. This reduces the plants ability to photosynthesise and so they don’t grow well

Question 7

How does ‘rose black spot’ spread? (2)

Answer 7

• The black spot fungus produces spores which are released under wet conditions and usually spread by rain-splash.
• The disease can also be passed from plant to plant on hands, clothing or tools.

Question 8

How do we treat plants for ‘rose black spot’? (2)

Answer 8

• Chop off infected leaves (make sure you destroy it so the fungi cant spread to other plants)
• Spray with fungicide which kills the fungi

Question 9

How are protists and fungi similar?

Answer 9

They both can be either unicellular or multicellular

Question 10

Some protists are classed as p__________

Answer 10

Parasites

Question 11

How do parasites live? (2)

Answer 11

• Live on or inside another organism
• Survive at the other organisms expense

Question 12

How are protists transported?

Answer 12

• By vectors (other organisms like insects which transport the protists between different organisms)
• Vectors don’t get the disease themself

Question 13

How is malaria caused? (3)

Answer 13

• By parasitic protists; they need a vector
• Transported between hosts by mosquitos
• When a mosquito feeds on an animal that has already been infected with the disease and it sucks out some blood, it can also suck up some of those malaria parasites. When another healthy animal comes along, and the mosquito feeds on it, the parasites get transferred (protists have spread to a new host)

Question 14

What are the symptoms of malaria?

Answer 14

• Humans get a bad fever and headaches
• Often these symptoms go away for a while but they keep coming back so we call them ‘recurrent episodes’. They can be fatal

Question 15

How do we prevent people from catching malaria? (2)

Answer 15

• Stop the vectors spreading the protists. We can reduce the number of mosquitos in an area by destroying their breeding sites or directly killing them with insecticides
• Stop mosquitos feeding on us: mosquito nets or mosquito repellent