Uh,er, a microbiologist might differ from that hypothesis. I was always getting in trouble when the botany professor demanded that you call certain types of molds proto-plants, but in the microbiology classes you were required to call them something else, which was not even necessarily the same terminology professor to professor, if the Mycology class was factored too. Right or wrong about the nomenclature, molds are quite skilled getting into things.
I should bring this up with a young Bioengineering phD friend I often chat with, just to try to jump start my memory of such things from back in far less informed days. Just for fun I did read through my old college Microbiology textbook a couple years ago, along with my wife's much newer Medical Microbiology textbook, preparing to use the microscope she gave me for my birthday. I had a nasty enough encounter with long dormant spores when I contracted Valley Fever at the age of 17.
What water mold manages to live on has long stymied me - seemingly nothing. But they must find some kind of nutrients there, in seemingly plain water.
