Fun evening science

My son reached into the bread drawer tonight and pulled out...a bag of homemade moldy bagels. I thought immediately about science (of course). We are currently studying clouds, but mold makes a nice detour. Ds did not want anything to do with it, but dd and I got out the microscope and slides and went to town on the mold after we ate our dinner. The bagels had three different colors-black, green and white. Using the scalpel we sliced off pieces of each color and looked at them all. We found that mold is actually made up of small spores that look like tiny bean bag balls. When they stick together they form lines of spores, looking like hair. We opened up our Usborne Internet-Linked Complete Book of the Microscope to do further research. We found out you should not eat moldy food even after removing the mold that you can see, as the mycelium threads will have already spread throughout the food. Some fungi are poisonous and can make you sick. It is not a good idea to breathe it in either, as you will be ingesting mold spores.

For further research you can go to Dennis Kunkel Microscopy, Inc. for some great images of fungi and slime molds.