The Fuzzy Stuff

After figuring out the relationship between the worms and the dead plant parts in our Dead Stuff Columns (it totally makes sense now why so many of our columns are looking like dark soil and not the vibrant colors we saw in the beginning), we've noticed that lots of groups are starting to have this fuzzy stuff appear seemingly out of nowhere.  Here's what we noticed about the "fuzzy stuff:"

1.  It appears to be getting bigger.
2.  It is located on the dead stuff columns and jars that are damp or wet. There's really no fuzzy stuff on the investigations that were going on under the heat lamp or in the fan.
3.  The fuzzy stuff is all kids of colors--we saw grey, white, blue, green, and even some pink fuzzy stuff.

This made us wonder..."What is that fuzzy stuff and what is it doing?"

So after some students claimed it was mold, we agreed that we needed to research.  We found a couple good sources of information and some great videos to show the relationship between the fuzzy stuff and the dead plants!

What is Mold?

Mold (or mould) is a term used to refer to fungi that grow in the form of multicellular thread-like structures called hyphae. Fungi that exist as single cells are called yeasts. Some molds and yeasts cause disease or food spoilage, others play an important role in biodegradation or in the production of various foods, beverages, antibiotics and enzymes.

null

null

Rotting Watermelon Decomposition Timelapse Footage

More rotting fruits and food at https://www.time-lapse-footage.com/stock-footage-clips/videos-fruits-and-food subscribe http://www.youtube.com/user/TEMP0NAUT?sub_confirmation=1 Timelapse footage video of a rotting watermelon over a span of 35 days availabe at https://www.time-lapse-footage.com/video-clip-183/watermelon reverse version: http://youtu.be/UyuMq3IuEQM .) subscribe to TEMPONAUT http://www.youtube.com/user/TEMP0NAUT?sub_confirmation=1 ____________ best comment: mold=humans watermelon=earth © TEMPONAUT - https://www.time-lapse-footage.com music © www.LUCKSTOCK.com https://LuckStock.com/r/YhhT1

Mold Time Lapse1

Special shooting aspergillus fumigatus botrytis mucor trichoderma cladosporium. Advice on growing mold - Ivanova Anna E. (Lomonosov Moscow State University, Department of Soil Science)

Mold Spore Dispersal Air

chains of spores or conidia are dispersed from a growing colony of mold

We figured out some pretty interesting things. First off, the fuzzy stuff was indeed mold, and that mold is a living thing! It's not an animal or a plant, but a type of fungus.  It comes in a variety of colors and needs moisture to survive.  It has spores which allow it to reproduce, and when they land on a food source, they begin to consume it.  All this explains why some of our dead stuff columns and jars got moldy and some didn't, and it also explains why we saw different kinds of mold appear and why our fruits began to shrink!

Of course we needed to develop some models to explain this, and a student couldn't have said it better when she said, "Hey--this is just like the badger and the larvae and the worms and the dead plants!"

We also revisited our dead stuff jars and made sense of why the weight in our jars didn't change, even though mold began growing in some of them.  Students recognized that as the mold grew, the fruits they put in the jars got smaller, showing nothing was really disappearing, but rather just "changing places" as someone put it.

We're still not certainly convinced of all this, and not everyone saw mold appear.  So we agreed that maybe we can figure some more things out if we use another organism that eats dead stuff.  Who could that be?

​US!