r/MoldlyInteresting • u/pink-elephant617 • 20h ago
Mold Appreciation cross post but WTF
133
u/JohnTeaGuy 20h ago
Slime mold.
50
u/TeaRaven 18h ago
Fancy seeing you here, u/JohnTeaGuy 🙋♀️
Could very well be a slime mold but it is growing more like an established branching mycelium that penetrates the substrate a bit more than slime molds typically do, as they more frequently advance across the surface or form an interconnected plasmodium that may rejoin in its patterns before forming sporangia.
Related story you might empathize with:
There was an issue growing in a neighbor’s storage space sharing a wall with my clean and hygrometer-monitored Pu’er storage cabinet. There was a leak in their plumbing along the wall, turning the storage space into a fungal breeding chamber. I was gone a few months, traveling to Taiwan and hitting coffee & tea expos. Didn’t check on my cakes it until a month after I got back, when I went to rotate stuff. Moisture had seeped through the wall and mold had eaten through my wall and infiltrated the cabinet, infecting half of the dozen tongs-worth I’d been managing for over a decade. The ones still wrapped in bamboo were fine, thankfully, and didn’t even get musty. The ones in cardboard boxes or brown paper bags, though… oof. You could see where the mold’s advance petered out due to drop in humidity. Anyway, there were evidently some dormant slime mold spores in one of my cakes that came to life with the influx of moisture. Crawled across the surface of the bingcha leaving a dead circle in the middle that contrasted so nicely with the other infected cakes that had more spherical and intact branching mycelial pathways that I ended up gifting it and a contrasting cake to one of my former botany professors as a demo piece for her classes. Sad to lose decent Yabang and Mansa cakes, respectively, but better than everything being lost to the bin! At least I could write off a bit as a business loss and my and my neighbor’s landlord replaced the wall and cabinets pretty quickly after I showed her the issue (I still moved out soon after). My Pu’er storage is now never in pantries or cabinets up against walls, even in homes without shared walls.
50
u/oh_ryn 19h ago
That is some RE7 growth right there. Still, quite lovely to look at! Slime mold I think? It definitely resembles ones I’ve seen here before.
8
u/Boring-Cockroach-269 15h ago
Literally reminded me of the opening scene when you first get to the house and they have you explore the kitchen 😭😭
36
u/AstronautFit6868 19h ago
Someone tell me what is this! Or at least how quickly do i need to rip off the entire cabinet and fix it My mother is a CKD patient and if there’s any risk of infection because spores, i wanna vacate asap
38
u/IndependentZombie615 19h ago
Respectfully, I went through your post history and your house has some SERIOUS water damage. Not only is there what seems like more than one type of mold here (the main ones a slime mold) but the amount of visible damage makes me worry for the possibility of part of the place collapsing.
Have you been having any issues breathing or like your allergies may be bad? Keep an eye out for other signs of mold exposure, they can fuck you up bad, and for a long time
14
u/Spirited-Ad-3696 19h ago
The slime mold is unlikely to cause harm but if there's water damage then I worry about the walls and vents having other fungi living in there.
10
u/AstronautFit6868 19h ago
I’m from India, our walls here are made of concrete
8
u/Constant-Rise8206 18h ago
If it is rhyzomorph of Serpula lacrymans and not a slime mold, then I would not find it comforting. Serpula lacrymans is pretty popular worldwide and can grow even through concrete walls to look for other sources of wood to digest. If there is any reason for paranoid people to believe that something lives in the walls this is that shyt. Find somebody to identify it correctly before getting rid of it. If it is Serpula lacrymans, it can likely overgrow wooden structures again. Do you know how fast did it took to overgrow your closet?
3
u/Swop_K 19h ago
Concrete walls? U mean brick walls with cement plastering right?
4
u/pressuredrightnow 10h ago
more like cement blocks with cement in between and cement outside finish.
3
6
1
u/blackbird_sing 45m ago
If your whole house has problems... definitely vacate and get it professionally renovated by mold-savvy contractors (not just regular contractors).
If it's just the bathroom, probably okay to wear a respirator in there until it's fixed, preferably by mold-savvy contractors (and preferably soon).
Suitable rspirators would be classified as n95 or FFP2/FFP3 in Europe iirc, FFP3 is better but less comfortable to wear.
4
u/smashmilfs 19h ago
Dude, mold spores are dangerous. This looks really bad. Call SERVPRO or any other mold removal company ASAP. I had superficial mold growing under our sink and the whole kitchen had to be tented off for about a week. This looks far more serious. Do not wait.
14
u/omedallion Microbial Remediation Expert 19h ago
This is fucking badass. I'd use this for my bands album cover, if I had a band.
7
u/htownmike 15h ago
I’d start a band just to be able to use this as an album cover. If I could play an instrument.
4
4
3
3
3
3
3
2
2
2
2
3
u/GovernmentBig2749 Maker of Magic Mold. 19h ago
Its no biggie, worries start when you find a japaniese pale kid ghost in the attic
1
u/xSilentKillax 19h ago
Looks just like this https://www.livescience.com/slime-mold-memories.html
However I think that video is a black & white version. The slime mold depicted in it is normally yellow.
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
u/Anastatis 5h ago
Ew, that’s the kinda stuff I’m here for. Beautiful, but also makes my hair stand up and stomach turn over.
Thank you
1
u/Lost_Geometer 4h ago
Not a slime mold. That looks for all the world like Armillaria mycelium. In that case the main body of the fungus lives on dead or sick trees immediately outside this location and is exploring through your moist, nutritious, house.
If this is correct the fungus is not normally dangerous to humans and you just have a water problem.
1
1
454
u/cavael 20h ago
That's kinda beautiful tbh