Sorry for your loss.
Where did you hear this from? I have never found mold being able to kill them outright. The mold most certainly began to happen after it had perished and then began to colonize the corpse.
Yes, I duplicated the hole pattern, percentages of soil composition and the squeeze test for saturation (before housing her). The only thing I added to his recommendation were springtails, and an extra hole at the top for easy filling of her tiny water dish. She used the starter burrow, ate, molted..everything seemed good. When I dug out the sling, I noted I hadn't added enough water along he way to keep it at 60%, but it was still moist. That and those weird growths are my only clues.
The fact that the mold/fungi was putting off aerial growth (the fuzzy appearance) tells me moisture levels in the substrate wasn't an issue. This is further reinforced by the fact you can see microdroplets of condensed water in the trapped air pockets against the enclosure sides (these are normal in small amounts and expected). Ventilation is on point and the sling looks like it was settled in well. For me, IMO, all signs point towards a complication from a bad molt that didn't start manifesting until the specimen started to harden up. At that point, it was out of your hands
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Everything looks great to me, sometimes slings just don't make it and it's impossible to zero in on the specific cause. The oak leaf pieces could have introduced a parasite but it's not very likely given the time of year. There's nothing obvious that was in error, it looks like you gave that sling the best opportunity you could have.
Oh then you're definitely in the clear on that, when I heard leaf pieces I thought maybe they were "raw" from out in the lawn or something. Baked and stored like what you've done and you can 100% put those in the enclosures without any worry. In fact they could possibly help the substrate to hold moisture for you.
