So I have been having some issues with viability of my exotics and wanting to give azures another shot, I inoculated 2 qts of rye berries from a supposedly clean syringe. They didn't want to germinate on agar (I should've bought a print. Is it against the rules to ask if anyone has a woodlover print for trade before I can access the marketplace? I wish I could remember my old account password...) and so I was hoping to get some going on grains to get a piece of myc to transfer to a plate for isolation. Nothing in both jars after a month, and so I got somewhat pissed and squirted a solid 3cc of the syringe in one of the jars. This 3cc held a large clump of hyphae/spores and after a few days it finally got going.
Slowly three little patches crept around the jar (does azure grow slower than cube/mex/pan myc or is it just me?) and it looked like all might be right with the world until the jar looked like it might benefit from a shaking and one week later I was left with a 60% colonized jar with patches of mold going throughout.
I removed the jar to dispose of later on (after yanking a bit of myc out for the agar) and sort of forgot about it for a week or so, but looking at it today there is no doubt that the mycellium is eating the infected grains/mold spores. There is far less contaminated grains than there were before. I've definitely never seen this with cubes, then again, I've always injected some bleach into infected jars and cleaned it out or threw it away (depending on how nasty it looked) when I first saw contamination take hold. I've never let one sit and given the two competing fungi time to duke it out.
It occurs to me that I've been growing for well over a decade and all of my knowledge of contaminated jars comes from when I was preparing my first grow and that can be summed up as "if you see a color other than white or smell something funky, throw the jar away". The mycellium is obviously winning out, I assume the infection will be smothered and killed off once this happens...
In any event, the contaminant, while in fact greenish, doesn't look very benign, too light, almost yellow. While I know such a presumption is ridiculous, this color always reminds me of a picture of a species of aspergillus in one of my old micro textbooks; the picture of the infected lung right next to it (as well as a farmer bowling buddy of mine who lost a lung and a quarter as well as an eye to an aspegillus infection...) always left me wary of light yellow greens. Keeping that in mind, I'm gonna let it go to see what happens, but should I hold onto the spawn if the mycellium wins? Or just take a sample for isolation and chuck it? Opinions?
I'm not sure how much good one extra qt. of spawn from an MS injection would do me (maybe I can make a small extra bed with it), but I'm curious as to whether the end result would be safe or not. I actually work in a large vaccine lab, I am less than two years away from a terminal degree in microbiology. I do know better than most how dangerous mycotoxins are, and while I admit that most of my knowledge concerns bacteria/viruses (the bulk actually, I've only taken two classes that dealt with fungi), I can't for the life of me see a mechanism by which anything toxic would end up in the final sporocarps. Perhaps someone can fill in this gap for me...
Thoughts on that whole rambling mess?
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Thanks for that!
How do heavy metals make their way through to the fruiting bodies? Well, a lack of a chelation mechanism like us, I'd imagine. I guess the better question is how would heavy metals find their way into the system in the first place. Excuse my ignorance...
I know aspergillosis isn't easy to catch without some underlying complication, but a lot of fungal infections are caught when a person encounters more spores than their immune response can handle. That's how my farmer friend caught it, moving hay from a stack from inside a barn, he said he could see the cloud of spores when he moved the first bundle with a pitchfork. Apparently, these kind of infections are not uncommon among farmers (they call it "Farmer's Gout", absolutely no idea why) and he ran to fresh air when he saw the cloud of spores and still managed to catch it. I always saw jars with fungal substrate as little spore concentrators. I'm sure a heavily contaminated jar can hold far more mold mycellium (and therefore, spores) than a normal room's walls, just waiting to release a cloud of death when the person opens the jar . Or am I just traumatized by a picture and a story (entirely possible)???
Off topic, but has anyone ever heard of mushroom grower catching an infection of any kind from a tainted jar?
Again, thank you for the reply!
Edited by Indigo-Child (10/04/15 09:04 PM)
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