Fuligo septica - Dog Vomit Slime Mold
Personally I think it looks more like scrambled rotten eggs.
These guys have been popping up everywhere recently. Found this grotesque one in Central Parl splayed out over a dead log, and yesterday in the middle of the night of course, we saw a big colony of it had formed in the wood chips out in front of our apartment.
This is another of the ephemeral, often equal parts beautiful and bizarre slime mold organisms. Fuligo septica begins life as individual myxamoebae that subsequently join forces into a homogenous plasmodium. The plasmodium eats everything it can, hidden from view, and then, when it runs out of food or it gets too dry to continue thriving in its current form, the plasmodium begins its transformation into an aethalium, the spore filled mass you see above.
These things, like most slimemolds, are cosmopolitan and can be found over most of the world. They can also pop up seemingly out of no where, so keep your eyes open for this bizarre organism. Only, if you decide to scrape at it, maybe take a sample for microscopy, just be careful to use a tool of some kind as, who knows, you could accidentally be dealing with actual dog vomit.
Info Sources:
Wikipedia on Fuligo septica
Master Gardener Program UW on Fuligo septica
I found this guy while hiking the other day. I had to do a double take because I thought it was either a marshmallow or someone's tongue. Apparently it too is a slime mold.
Awesome! So weird, you might reasonably mistake that for discarded fluff or a melted marshmallow. In fact I would guess it's young Enteridium lycoperdon, which I've never seen in person.
Of course sometimes these things really are just gross detritus. I picked up what I thought was a plasmodium once and turned out to be someone horrible loogie! It was pretty gross.
wow that is very weird, is this the only organism that behaves in this way?
This is, broad strokes, the life cycle of plasmodial slimemolds in general, although different species develop into different shapes and sizes, and this was the only one I'd heard of transforming because of dryness. That last bit could be anecdotal of course, I haven't done a comprehensive read up.
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