u/Great-Purchase-7591

These are some of my photos of fungi and slime moulds. I realise many of them aren't that great, still wouldn't hurt to share them. You may recognise some of these from Wikipedia, which is where I used some of them to brighten up biological articles. Feel free to use them for any kind of purposes. Not exactly pure microbiology (sorry).

1. Flammulina velutipes 2. Clavaria rosea (?) 3. Mucor (?) 4. Trichia decipiens 5. No idea 6. No idea 7. Trichaptum biforme 8. Don't remember 9. Definitely mucor 10. Not so sure 11. No idea 12. Some coral fungus 13. Nidularia 14. Forgot 15. Mystery (yeast-like, some have suggested this is Aerobasidium) 16. Cordyceps sinesis 17. Again mucor (?) 18. Again trichia decipiens, mature form 19. Forgot 20. Some polypore

So a while ago I decided to extract yeast from strawberries. I wasn't hoping for anything, especially given that (at the time) I had no proper lab equipment.

Nevertheless, after just a few short days following the first attempt I started noticing these mysterious structures forming.. inside the agar, not on the surface. I guess I just lack the words to describe the shape of these colonies. They appeared to be three-dimensional, spreading those tentacle arms in all directions.

Unfortunately, I never captured the dynamic of their growth, neither their exact size (at least not on the footage). The average size in diameter is 2 mm (for mature colonies). Slight brownish colour.

I once cut a piece of agar with a colony out of the environment and placed the slices under the microscope. They did turn out to be fungal structures, and certainly yeast-like, since the lines they formed appeared as pseudohyphae. Additionally, asci can be seen 'sprouting' from the 'branches'. I have struggled to identify the species ever since.

All of this happened about two years ago. I preserved the extract in the form of a liquid (the one I originally used to plant the culture) and a few pieces of agar with the colonies. A couple of days ago I replanted the yeast on some new agar. I saw only two colonies forming. Interestingly, only in the part of the agar which was disturbed and uneven. And again, they just refused to grow on the surface.

As for the initial extraction, I simply smashed some old strawberries and added water, I made them mix and saved the liquid. I realise this is just terrible but I then poured some of the liquid on solid agar that I prepared. The agar was the usual household type powder, mixed with sugar. As I said, no proper lab equipment or resources.

However, this time I was able to notice a thin film, barely visible, growing on the surface of the Petri dish. (It was absent in many places, including those, where underneath were the star colonies). I took a look under the microscope, most of the thing was some species of streptomyces. Some stranded yeast were there too, quite similar to the ones forming the star colonies. But again, this was on the surface of the very same Petri dish, where just centimeters away two colonies of the same yeast were sprouting beneath the surface. This is not the first time when I see yeast alongside streptomyces. Needless to say, this is no clean culture. Appears as if the yeast aren't feeling any great near the streptomyces, though who knows.

I would appreciate any help with identifying the species. The absurdly bizarre shape of these colonies has been keeping me up at night for quite a time. I have never seen anything remotely like this before. I also find it rather concerning that this organism grows beneath the surface of the agar: after all, why would a self-respecting yeast species deliberately settle in a place where it is certainly deprived of oxygen? The same agar worked for cultivating yeast from a melon and a cherry, in which cases everything was normal, with the yeast growing nicely on the surface, so I highly doubt that there is an issue with the agar itself. Could they be evading the streptomyces?

(Post scriptum: my apologies for the low resolution of some of these photos, I use my phone to take pictures from the microscope, and my immersion oil had run out at the time the microscope pictures were taken. The microscopic photos were taken at 40x. Sorry for making this post so needlessly long.)