Identification and Control Methods of Slime Mold Diseases in Oyster Mushrooms

Symptoms The slime mold colonies harming oyster mushrooms are white, and during the vegetative growth stage they mostly spread outward in a feather-like pattern, generally difficult to distinguish from oyster mushroom mycelium. In the middle and late stages of oyster mushroom growth, the slime mold develops rapidly. When the mushroom bed has high humidity, the slime mold spreads from the bottom layer of the substrate to the surface layer, beginning to appear on the surface of the mushroom bed as bright orange-yellow gelatinous filaments, which then rapidly produce powdery gelatinous masses, namely the slime mold spores entering the reproductive stage. The gelatinous masses spread rapidly from the stipe to the cap of the oyster mushroom, gradually enveloping the entire fruiting body and causing the fruiting bodies to rot and collapse. Slime mold diseases of oyster mushrooms damage the mushroom bed, destroy the substrate, and cause the bed surface to fail to produce mushrooms or to become infected after mushrooming, with the substrate and fruiting bodies rotting and deteriorating. This disease is particularly common and severe when oyster mushrooms are cultivated outdoors in open sunken beds.

Pathogen Physaraceaesp., called slime mold of the family Physaraceae, is a lower fungus. Its characteristic is that the vegetative body has no cell wall and appears as a plasmodial structure, also called a protoplasmic mass. When it enters the reproductive stage and forms fruiting bodies, the shape becomes fixed and cell walls are formed, and large numbers of round or oval spores are produced. Different species of slime molds have different