孢 essentially never appears alone — it's a 19th/20th-century coined character used to translate the European biological term 'spore.' You'll see it in 孢子 (bāozǐ, 'spore'), 孢子植物 ('spore-bearing plants'), 孢蒴 (bāoshuò, 'sporangium / spore capsule').
memory
孢 = 子 (zǐ, 'child/seed') + 包 (bāo, 'wrap / packet') giving both meaning and sound: a 'wrapped seed' is a perfect description of a spore. Same phonetic pattern as 苞 (bāo, 'flower bud') — 'wrapped petals' — but with a different radical to mark the biological cell.
