Let me tell you all a story about the importance of negative controls. This is a reminder that we all screw up. About a week ago I posted a photo of what appeared to be a dominant fungal morphotype growing from plated macerates of serial diluted #Massospora plugs!

Our plan was to see what fungi took up residence in Massospora plugs either as a result of already being inside the cicada or that colonized the plugs from the outside. At first I did not have negative controls because i thought the sterile water on the bench was STERILE.

But thinking back to my first attempt last year, I couldn't recall this culturable fungus. As a reminder Massospora does not grow on agar. So we collected an additional six Massospora-infected cicadas and this time I prepared new sterile water. The white fungus was missing!

As a check, I also plated some of the old water and new water to see if any fungi were kicking around. The results confirmed what i had already suspected: the water was harboring a white fungus. The source was the water not the cicada!!!

Moral of the story: we all screw up, especially PIs with little time to set up their own side projects. But we need to normalize failure because that's how science works. We learn and move on to the next experiment.