Identify?

[ADishOfPetri]

Hi. I am not a scientist or anything close. But I was teaching my 7 year old about germs this week and we did petri dishes as our new house.

The two I am curious about are the one we did on the inside of my water bottle straw and the gas stove-which is broken and waiting to cart off so not using|touching.  We swabbed the little insert piece that is under the plate-where the flame starts.

 

Is there any way to identify a little more of each? Like why did the stove get this type when the whole house was cleaned (and I think professionally) before move in? And little to no traffic in the weeks prior. Stove hasn't been used in 5 months when owners moved out. 

Would the water bottle one decipher if one is sick or healthy based off this?

Both grew instantly and it has been a week and I am going to dispose of them whereas the other ones we did were very slow (like 3 days) and still don't have much. Definitely don't think I did them correctly. But I did nothing different between the slow ones and the fast ones. I had properly cleaned hands, did not ever touch the tips of the q tips, and never opened the petri dish after.

 

Thanks.

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More.

Last image.

Edited December 13, 2020 by ADishOfPetri
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[RobertMD]

The specimen from the stove is surely fungal, possible Rhizopus spp, which is a very common strain of fungus at home (specially in old houses) even in leftover breads and pastries. The spores from these fungi are very resilient to disinfection that's why despite the (professional) cleaning done at your household, a lot of it still remained.

I cannot extract much information from the photo of the specimen from the drinking straw. It could be anything, really, since the mouth is  home to millions of microorganisms that can also be isolated using a petri dish.

[ADishOfPetri]

Thank you!  the house is 14 years old, so not terribly old.

I appreciate the feedback!

[PhilGeis]

What you should take away from these observations is that microbes are everywhere.  They're not necessarily growing - may be present as dormant spores.    As RobertMD observed - it does look like Rhizopus sp. (look for it on Google images) but it's neither possible to identify specifically the microbes from the pictures nor estimate the health of using the water bottle bsed on th pictures.