Life on rust

[Beatsy]

Prompted by Deanimator's recent posts of rust images, I realised I'd never looked at that really closely and had a quick go. I picked a random rusty screw from an old jar stored indoors. The thread is 4mm diameter.

I did a 5x stack and noticed what looked like patches of white mould dotted around. On closer inspection, it was! The close-up (20x, very close cropped) shows a gelatinous substrate with what looks like spore-covered tendrils (fruiting bodies, or hyphae?) emerging.

Gosh - life everywhere!!

[Deanimator]

That's very interesting.

I've got a very old set of sockets, some of which are rusty. I'll have to take a look at them.

[Lou Jost]

If there is life on Mars, that's what it would look like!

[Olympusman]

This may be kind of weird, but there used to be a company not far from where I live that had a huge business in rust. You would drive by and there would be these open cauldrons of scrap metal with steam flowing through them. The Iron oxide pigment was used in cosmetics and paint.

Mike