Prettiest slime mold yet, Discovery Park

Fred Rhoades tells me that these are the newly emerged fruiting bodies of Ceriatomyxa fruticulosa, or coral slime. Eventually these tendrils will become opaque and then become stippled with tiny spores on stalks.

Slime mold revisited, Discovery Park

Remember this, from Nov. 18?

It's a slime mold amoeba climbing a tree so it can produce spores. Here's what it looked like yesterday:

Fred Rhoades says it is likely Physarium polycephalum, a species that is easy to culture and as a result, widely studied. Among the discoveries about Physarium: it can navigate mazes and can provide the computing power for a light-avoiding robot.
It's impossible to say for sure, what it is, however, without having an expert examine the fruiting bodies closely -- possibly under a microscope.
In case you ever need to do this, here are Rhoades' instructions for sending slime mold fruiting bodies through the mail.
"The best way is in a tiny box that you put in an envelope. Take the fruiting body scrap removed on a small sliver of the bark that is on and glue it down in the bottom of a small matchbox or similar. Put a bit of cotton ball or some such in on top to stabilize it and slip the whole thing in an envelope, perhaps gluing the box down on a card to stabilize its position in the envelope. Any small, rigid container will work. The main thing is to protect the fruiting bodies from being crushed or shaken as they are very fragile."

Yummy slime, Discovery Park

A giant amoeba oozes up a tree to release spores, and a slug takes a slimy meal. Although it's not as weird as its drippy lunch, the mollusk is pretty odd. It's a native species, Phrophysaon andersoni, with two distinctive talents: it can shed its tail when attacked and it gushes orangish yellow slime when disturbed.
It's not possible to identify the slime mold until it sets up its spore releasing structures. Fred Rhoades kindly identified the moss as Ulota or a small Orthotrichum.


Here's another look at the slime mold.

Other kingdoms, Newhalem

Fungi: The elegant agate-like fans of Trametes versicolor, or Turkey Tails.


Protista: Fruiting bodies of Ceratiomyxa fruticulosa or coral slime mold.


Plantae, Fungi, and Bacteria: come together in the lichen Lobaria oregana. Along with a fungus and an algae, these lichens have nitrogen-fixing cyanobacteria. When they fall from trees, they fertilize forest soils.

Where the giant yellow amoebas roam

This weekend I went up Rattlesnake Mountain, near North Bend, Wash., and had a delightful hike through the woods. We saw a couple dozen of these:

This is a slime mold: Fuligo septica, or if you prefer the common name, dog vomit slime mold.
What we're seeing is the mobile, amoeboid form of the slime mold, one giant oozing, branching, decaying wood devouring cell. At the right stage, and on a diet of wood chips or beauty bark, it can look so much like dog vomit that it triggers calls to the veterinarian.
Here's one that is a little further along in development:

There's a black, bruise-like blur in one spot where spores are forming. Eventually, it'll go through a series of changes, ending up as a blue-black sporing body.
Also coming into bloom on the forest floor was Indian Pipe. Indian pipe is ghostly white and fungus-like because it doesn't get its energy from sunlight. Instead, it uses a fungus as an intermediary to get energy from nearby trees.

Slimed!

When I first saw these pink and gray blobs on a rotting log in Discovery Park, I thought they must be some kind of mushroom. It turns out they're much weirder.

But mushrooms don't behave like this. Fred Rhoades, a lichen and fungus expert, who lives in Bellingham and is in the process of retiring from Western Washington University, set me straight. This is a slime mold: Lycogala epidendrum, or Wolf Milk Slime. Much of its life it's a big pink blob, with no cell walls, but many nuclei, oozing through the rotting wood like an amoeba, out of sight of human observers. But when conditions are right to make spores, it forms these little cushions, which start off rosy like the amoeba and then darken to gray.

Eventually, they'll become brittle and break to release powdery spores.