Lily Rozell Hatcher, age l0, of Wichita, Kan., for her question:
What do molds really look like?
The world of nature teems with endless beauties that please our eyes. We expect the trees to grow in handsome shapes and the flowers to paint themselves in pretty colors. We admire most of the animals that we see and enjoy their graceful elegance.
Our eyes need never run short of things to admire in nature, and we tend to suspect these beauties of form and color are there dust to please us but if this were so, nature's artwork would include only the plants and animals that are big enough for our eyes to see. As we probe with magnifying glasses and microscopes We discover this is not true that tiny living things are dust as handsome as their seeable relatives.
We share our planet with multitudes of microscopic plants and animals. some of them, such as the molds and mildews, throng together in teeming masses. Our eyes see these swarming populations as blurry patches of green or gray, yellow or sooty black. Magnified under a microscope, a mold becomes a miniature garden of separate plants.
Our planet's thousands of different molds are related to the fungus plants. We find them growing in mild, moist places where they feed upon decaying fruit and Vegetables, meat arid paper, straw and manure. Under the microscope the moldy patches reveal forms like fans and feathery foliage, geometric spikes and globes or gems set in graceful fillagrees. They may be glassy clear, frothy white or tinted with rainbow colors.
A moldy bit of bread may swarm with green penicillum mold. Magnified it looks like a spongy mat sprouting a forest of Blender stems, each topped with a fan shaped front of greenery. A patch of black bread mold may look like a tangled thicket with stiff stems topped with wheels of tiny dark balls. The dark topping is clusters of clusters of spores.
The microscope reveals that the plant like shoots of a mold spring from a rug of tangled threads. This is the mycelium that feeds and nourishes the shoots that produce the spore seedlet. We find the botryosporium mold that sprouts a thicket like snow covered shrubbery on decaying leaves. The candlestick mold sprouts geometric spikes like toothpicks topped with perfect little glass globes. Dark mucor molds of the forest floor look like drafted Jewelry with miniature gems set in delicate metalwork. each mold follows its own blueprint for growing and each has its own microscopic wonders of design and color.
The molds and mildews spring fry hardy spores that can survive through years of drought and hardship. Under mild, moist conditions they burst their shells and sprout threads of mycelium like masses of tangled cotton. The mycelium thrives on rich nourishment from plant or animal material. The crowded shoots and their spores form patches of mold big enough to be seen. The largest mold spores measure about l,000 to an inch.