Dec 2nd, 2021: Observing Expired Yogurt w/ Black Mold

While my mom was cleaning out the refrigerator, she found a long forgotten, medium-sized cup of plain yogurt dated at May, 17,2020 teeming with black mold.

A perfect candidate for observation, I excitedly scooped out a small blob of black mold with a plastic fork onto a microscopic slide.

"Now this got to have something interesting in it," I thought to myself as I prepared the slide and booted Motic Images Plus 2.0 on my computer.

After searching between black fungi debris, fungi stems, and dust particles, I found myself some small treasures of cocci bacteria, a lot of dead microorganisms, and plenty of structures unknown to me.

Below is a gallery of screenshots taken of this sample:

*All were taken at a total magnification of x400 with a compound microscope.

Hypotheses for the unknown structures and the plethora of dead microorganisms:

• The presence of the black mold must have caused a decrease/increase in pH for the microorganisms in the yogurt to be dead.

• The nutrients that the black mold was consuming and taking over helped the growth of the fungi, thus the increase in fungi spores and growth of fungi heads.

• The cocci bacteria in the yogurt were the bacteria present before mold started growing on it.

Conclusion:

I will need to compare my screenshots with that of the screenshots found on google. With this, I will identify, draw out my findings on my iPad Air, and identify key words to help identify the scientific names of what I've found.