Description
Golden Teacher Spores!
Comes with 10cc of Golden Teacher spores, an 18g needle to get your spores onto the slides, and an alcohol wipe so you can ensure that your microscope is super clean.
These chaps tend to be good for beginners to look at under the microscope, as they are usually pretty hardy and can cope with a lot of mistakes. Bit of an all-time classic, for good reason. Pretty much everyone’s starting point in their microscopy studies. because these spores are great for using with microscopes. Fun Fact time! If you lived in Brazil or Jamaica they’d be great for growing mushrooms (you can even buy magic mushrooms legally in Jamaica), so I dunno, maybe move there if you wanna have fun with them.
Interestingly, whilst these are super easy to use, and most people start off their mycological journeys with them, I think it’s a bit of a self-sustaining myth: I don’t believe that any of the other Psilocybe cubensis phenotypes are any more difficult than another. I mean, yeah, sure, my experience is anecdotal as well, but I’ve had a fair bit of that experience. They’re still awesome, and still something that I like to research (even after all this time!) and that’s what really matters.
I suppose I should throw in some technical stuff here for people that really wanna read about it: we take our GT spore prints (the very same ones we sell), and then we add them to some sterile distilled water, mixing them thoroughly with a magnetic stirrer in front of our two huge flow units. We then draw this up into fresh medical-grade syringes, and seal them with sterile syringe caps. It’s quite a time-consuming process, but it is the best way of ensuring that the spores are in the best possible condition.
Wanna read more about the mysterious origins of these spores? I’ve done a blog post, called “Golden Teacher Mushrooms (and spores!)” that you can read by clicking on the words. Handy!
Ideally, keep these spores refrigerated, where they will happily last a couple of years. Magic mushroom spores are tough like that – don’t let them freeze though! Failing that, you can keep them in a nice dark cupboard where they’ll be just fine for at least six months. They’re pretty simple to store. You can even use them multiple times, just replace the needle cap back on (don’t remove the needle as that’s one more chance for contaminants to get in there), and the next time you go to use them, heat the needle up with a lighter until it glows red. Simple! You could even put them back into the supplied bag if that’s your jam.
This spore syringe has been produced in the UK using a flowhood in order to make sure that what you see under the microscope is exactly what’s supposed to be there and nothing else – just premium spores!
The sciencey bit:
Size: Golden Teacher spores (one of the Psilocybe cubensis species phenotypes) are typically 11-17 x 7-12µm (this means micrometers). You get a thousand micrometres to a millimetre, so if you could somehow stack the spores shoulder-to-shoulder and make a flat square millimetre of them, you’d have roughly ten thousand of them, right there. This is how they manage to survive in less hospitable outdoor environments instead of a monotub or a bag of grain – each mushroom sends out a massive amount of spores, and some will be lucky enough to meet another compatible spore and begin reproducing. You’ll want a microscope that’ll do 400x to even be able to see them, but 1000x will let you get a really good view of the details.
Colour: They’re very dark purple, sometimes going as far as brown. It’s not easy to distinguish this when they’re on a spore print, as there are so many of them they can often appear black, but when you’re mixing them into a beaker of sterilised distilled water, you’ll notice it take on a purple tint when the spores hit the magnetic mixer bar, like very weak Vimto. If they clump together in the spore syringe, they’ll look black most of the time, due to even a small clump being thousands and thousands of spores.
Shape: Sub-ellipsoid, which as far as I’m concerned means they’re a bit like little eggs. There’s a slightly thinner part of the cell wall at the tip of the spore, which is where the genetic material inside the spore will reach out from when it begins to search for nutrients and other spores. They’re smooth on the outside with no weird lumps, and the cell wall is about 1µm thick. The more I write about them, the more I realise that they really are quite similar to eggs; I suppose once nature finds an efficient way of doing something, it sticks with it.
Handy dos and don’ts:
DO:
- Keep it somewhere cool and dark, it’ll keep for 6 months+
- Keep it in the fridge maybe, it’ll last for years there
- Enjoy microscopy, it’s a great hobby
- Read/watch a variety of microscopy techniques across sites like Reddit and YouTube, knowledge is power
- Be really clean when you’re handling it, it’s critical
DON’T:
- Drink it. You can, it won’t hurt you, it’s just very expensive pop at that point
- Try and grow anything with it, unless you live somewhere where that is legal
- Store it anywhere dusty, dirty, or hot
- Try and do your microscopy in a drafty, dusty room
For a bit more detailed of an explanation on exactly what to do, click here!
Product Information: contains Psilocybe cubensis mushroom spores and distilled sterilised water, in a sterile syringe
