Much like a bell-shaped mushroom that you might find growing on a forest floor, the world’s mould species belong to the fungi kingdom. However, the two are distinctly different. Most fungi can be either multicellular or unicellular organisms, feasting on organic matter such as the carbon and glucose content found in decaying leaves. Moulds, on the other hand, are only ever multicellular organisms, which tend to extract nutrition from many different sources, such as decaying material, paper, wood and even paints.
There are more than 100,000 different species of moulds on Earth, many of which can be found in your home. As part of their reproductive cycle, moulds release their version of seeds, called spores. Moulds
