Lesson 16: I'm a Fun Guy!

Is your bread mold growing yet? In a few minutes we will look at it under the microscope…but first, let’s learn a little bit about bread mold, a fungus in phylum Zygomycota.

Print this picture and color along while we talk about the structure of bread mold.

To most people, bread mold looks like gray fuzz. But up close, as you can see, bread mold looks like thin stalks capped by roundish balls called sporangiophores. Spores are formed inside the sporangiophores, and then they are released and drop, blow away, and land on other surfaces where new molds will grow. Color the sporangiophores ORANGE. The sporangiophores sit atop thin stalks called aerial hyphae. Sometimes these hyphae lengthen, run along the ground, and form new filaments. Color the aerial hyphae (the stems) BROWN and the stolons (that run along the ground and join two groups of aerial hyphae together) RED. The rhizoid hyphae makes up the rootlike mass of fungus under the surface. Color the rhizoid hyphae BLUE. The rhizoids, the sporangia, and the stolons are all types of hyphae. So basically Zygomycotes have three types of hyphae.

http://youtu.be/JUVcxa-wGcE

Most zygomycotes aren’t dangerous, even if you eat them. But they can sure make your food look unappetizing…which reminds me that it is time to check out your bread mold under the microscope. Is it growing yet?

Make a wet mount slide by scraping up a tiny bit of mold with a toothpick. Observe your specimen on all powers and sketch what you see.