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.
Left child radical — pictograph of a swaddled infant with arms but no legs visible. Carries the 'offspring, seed' meaning here: a spore is a single reproductive cell, the smallest unit of fungal or fern offspring. Same family: 孩 child, 孙 grandchild, 孕 pregnant, 孵 to hatch.
Right 包 supplies the sound bāo with no drift, identical pinyin. 包 itself depicts a foetus wrapped in the womb — and that meaning carries through here as a faint semantic bonus: a spore is a tiny package of life, wrapped in a tough outer wall ready to be released. Same phonetic in 抱 hug, 泡 bubble, 跑 run.
