The images look good. What are the black dots in your agar?
Oh Zap!
This is what a spore syringe looks like after it has germinated on a petri dish. You can see that there are a large number of distinct colonies which are all competing against one another.
http://lightningspore.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/spore-germ-zap-1-scaled.webp
You have a lot of options to choose from here (I had about 3 plates which looked like this). What I do next is then use a scalpel to extract the edges of clean and vigorous looking colonies and move them to another dish to grow out further. We call this the T1 generation. In order to save time and plates I did 3 transfers to each new plate. Starting at the T2 generation, I will only do a single transfer to each plate.
http://lightningspore.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/spore-germ-zap-2-scaled.webp
Someone sung to me to praises of the WEBP image format, so I've started to upload all my images in that format (500kB vs 5MB for these images). Let me know if you cannot see the images.
Discussion
Sometimes I get these weird artifacts when making it. I believe it is something with the malt extract. I thought I had figured it all out, but this batch was bad. Doesn’t hurt the effectiveness though.