I scraped some cubensis spores to agar plates 8 days ago. The spore prints are of questionable quality so I expected some contamination. I am an agar newbie and not sure how to assess these plates. Could you help? The medium used is MEA.

Here is one McKennaii plate and it looks like healthy tomentose mycelium forming. It grows only where the spores were dropped (I used way too much I know...) but the white growth looks more like polyfill and is quite bulky. I am worrying it could be a mould:





The Golden Teacher plates are even trickier. There is no visible mycelium, only a brownish shapes around the spores but also growing from other parts of the dish.







Should I discard these? I made a spore syringe from the GT spores and inoculated some BRF jars. They germinated just fine and white fluffy mycelium grows from the inoculation points with no signs of contamination.

None of the plates are contaminated except for one tiny orange spor on one plate (bacterial blob?). The plates were sterilised in PC after being poured and wrapped in alu foil, then transferred to glove box and sealed with Parafilm after the inoculation.

the photos aren't great, but the mckennaii actually look rhizomorphic... does it look like strands of string?

the golden teacher looks like contamination...

I did my best with fluorescent tube, but it was very hard to avoid reflections and over/underexposure.

There are no strands or strings. It's more grainy than fluffy which makes me worried.

How's it looking now? Any changes or improvements?

Flashlight with a piece of paper in front of it.

Imo just wait and it will be clear. You cant really tranfer anyways.

Okay, here are the photos taken with white LED flashlight. I sharpened the images to highlight the mycelium structure:





The orange spot is just reflection of another light source:







I plan to use agar wedges to inoculate rye grain.