What Is a Spore?
Spore Prints: A Mushroom’s Fingerprint▾
- 1What Is a Spore?
- 2Catch Your Spore Print
- 3The Big Reveal
- 4Be a Mushroom Detective
A secret under the cap
Every mushroom hides a secret under its cap. It is a fine, colored dust called spores.
Spores are how fungi make more fungi. They are the start of every new mushroom.
Like seeds, but tinier
A flower makes seeds. A spore does a job a little like a seed. But a spore is much, much smaller.
One spore is far too tiny to see. You would need a microscope. In fact, it takes about 25,000 spores just to cover the head of a pin!
And a mushroom does not make only a few. It makes billions. One gilled mushroom can drop about 30,000 spores every single second. Wow!
Where spores are made
Turn a mushroom cap over. Do you see the thin lines under it? Those are the gills.
The gills are where spores are made. When the spores are ready, they float away on the moving air.
If a spore lands in a moist, cozy spot, it wakes up. It grows into mycelium, the fuzzy web of a fungus. Later, that web can grow brand new mushrooms. Then the whole story starts again!
Making the invisible visible
One spore is invisible. But billions of spores in a pile are easy to see!
When we catch a whole pile of spores on paper, we get a spore print. It looks like colored dust in the shape of the gills.
In this course you will catch your very own spore print. It is part art and part magic. Let's get ready!
Answer every question, then check how you did. You can try as often as you like — your score is just for you.
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