Woah... What, Is, This...

[Michael]

So here are my latest bin conditions, I added one pound worms to my bin(10/22), then the next day I defrosted and processed some food(spaghetti,mixed vegetables, a takeout salad that was never eaten-no dressing), a few days prior to this I added a raw banana peel to the bin that seemed to create a LOT of bugs,so I am definitely going the frozen route.

I noticed some excess moisture in the bin(the lid stayed on all the time), I wiped off the lid what I could, and then put the lid back on. Three days ago I took another look and noticed this fungus/mold growth on the right side, so I scraped it all off, and added fresh bedding especially to that side. That night I received my noskedo machine, and I put it near the bin, so I am now able to leave the lid off in my home without worry of bugs.

Then I come home from work today, and see this. What in the world is that, and why is it there? Where have I gone wrong? When I first started my bin I had a small white misty mold but that went away quickly. This is... yellow, and devastatingly hideous.

Any help is much appreciated :)

[catherine daly]

It's just one of nature's many moulds! Bury it gently in some damp shredded bedding and I bet it will be gone in a few days!

[Michael]

So the mold will be eaten by the works ultimately? Is there Anything I can do to prevent this from happening again?

[Michael]

I scraped off what I could from the sides, dug down into the bedding and pushed it in... then wiped the sides clean(er) with a wet paper towel... it hasn't grown back yet so that's good! ...works=worms** (Darn auto-spell)

[Eve]

Its slime mold. Slime Mold

When i lived in the pacific northwest in the wet seasons i could sometimes see it slowly inching its way across the lawn.

[rom mendoza]

Had to google slime mold just because of the name, found it quite fascinating so far. From what I've read so far this doesn't look like anything I'd want in my worm bin. Best case scenario is that it feeds on the same kinds of micro-organisms our worms feed on and just compete with them for food. Based on Wikipedia article I read, they seem to behave more like "critter" (animal?) life than plant life ... don't think the worms will feed on this until it exhausts it's food supply, reproduces and dies. They appear to thrive in the same conditions as a well maintained worm bin (moist and lots of micro-organisms to eat), may be neat to experiment with but I would probably want to chuck it out of my indoor bins.

[Erick]

That is some weird stuff! Seems it lives (comes to grow?) in spots with favourable conditions, which looks like it might not even be your whole bin:

When the food supply wanes, the plasmodium will migrate to the surface of its substrate and transform into rigid fruiting bodies. The fruiting bodies or sporangia are what we commonly see, they superficially look like fungi or molds but are not related to the true fungi. These sporangia will then release spores which hatch into amoebae to begin the life cycle again.

The way I read this is that they live under/in a part of your bin and once the food source (in that spot) runs out they migrate towards the surface to form the fruiting bodies, unless they migrate throughout the bin before coming up, but that would mean the whole bin would be a favourable habitat, which would be more likely in a smaller bin I guess. As long as they don't cover the whole bin I don't think it forms a huge problem. Now once they start sporting those lovely looking fruiting bodies (I like the wikipedia picture that says "dog vomit" slime mold, haha) you do end up having those spores (In biology, a spore is a reproductive structure that is adapted for dispersal and surviving for extended periods of time in unfavorable conditions) in your bin, so if at a certain point in time your whole bin ends up a favorable habitat? Who knows, haven't run into it before, so I don't think there is a huge chance of that happening.

The one thing I would do for sure is grab my magnifying glass and look for:

Within each protoplasmic strand the cytoplasmic contents rapidly stream. If one strand is carefully watched for about 50 seconds the cytoplasm can be seen to slow, stop, and then reverse direction.

How cool is that!

[rom mendoza]

I find this all fascinating. If I could go back in time to my college days I might have convinced myself out of accounting and into the area of botany or horticulture.

[Erick]

If you haven't already you should check out David Attenborough's new BBC series Life. The adaptations species have made to exploit certain niches always amazes me. And the excellent filming only improves on the series.