A dead pine tree stump in the yard that was never cut off at the base.
The orange“berries” were real attention getters.
This was my first introduction to slime molds.
Its alive and oozing across the stump.
It oozes over anything in its way.
Most slime molds eat bacteria as the main stable in their diet.
Badhamia ultricularis is one of the few slime molds that is regarded as also being a fungivore. That means that it eats some of the fungus amungus.
Slime molds are not primitive forms of life. At the microscopic level, they exhibit an amazing level of complexity.
The organism moves across the surface in its search for food.
The yellow mass is called a “plasmodium” and represents the normal living and growing state of the slime mold. Note the “surge lines” on the left indicating previous advances of the plasmodium.
The previous picture was on February 1, This picture was taken a day later, in the morning. The plasmodium is coming out of a crack between the limb cut and the bark.
A close-up of the plasmodium from the previous picture. This is a time of active movement of the protoplasm. The opening is an insect borehole, about 1/4 inch across.
Same location, same slime mold, but taken two hours after the previous two pictures. The slime mold has withdrawn from the exposed surface.
For a stump that is ten inches in diameter at this point, this is a lot of slime mold. The next picture was taken part-way around the stump at the same time as this picture!
The two patches on the left have already developed into immature spore bodies (sporangia). The plasmodium from the earlier pictures is visible on the right.
The next day again.. The plasmodium is streaming on the right, and appears to be getting ready to develop the sporangia (spore bodies) on the left.
THE STAGES OF TRANSITION FROM PLASMODIUM TO SPORANGIUM.
<------------------------------->
Different myxomycetes form different sporing structures
The plasmodium starts to lump up (as seen on the left), then starts to hang down in elongated tubes.
The protoplasm in the tubes moves to the future spore chamber, while the plasmodium empties.
The nuclei in the plasmodium undergo a flurry of multiplication and division, then move into "Future Fruiting Structures" (usually characteristic of the species), undergo a flurry of partitioning wherein each nucleus becomes surrounded by a wall to form a separate object.
The end product of all that math is that the spore chamber, called a sporangium, is filled with discrete spores waiting to be released into the environment
The outer surface of the sporangium is called the peridium, With age and drying, it becomes duller in color.
This group of sporangia are suspended by unusually long stalks. Note that some pieces near the top of the clump did not develop sporangia.
Better camera, better close-ups. This collection fruited in moss at the base of the stump several years later.
A transitional color stage during the maturation process.
Yellow, orange, brownish, blue-black, dead-grey are the colors of the sporangium maturation sequence.
Here is a different patch of sporangia. The color is a day after the sporangia formed.
The color two days after the previous picture.
The color on the third day of this sequence. The weather dried out emphasising the color change
The peridium (the outer wall of the plasmodium) has been blown off by heavy winds and rain in this picture, The spore mass is too wet to be blown away now.
This is an earlier year. Wind and age have blown portions of the peridium away, and removed some of the spores.
A closeup of the peridium and the sporangium , and also of the internal structure of the fruiting body.
A much closer view of a single sporangium showing the internal supporting structure of spines, called the capillitium. What looks like spores are actually clumps of spores.
Another sporangium, showing the peeled-back peridium, and the capillitium. The small divisions of the scale are 0.1 millimeter.
In case you forgot just how small the sporangia can be, here is a clump of the one fruiting on the moss.
A slime mold beetle, genus Anisotoma? crawling on a mass of sporangia. Body length about 3/4 millimeter.
Now you know that this is not an avocado, but a single Badhamia ultricularis sporangium, one millimeter in size, fruiting in moss.
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pulling a tuft of capitilliums reveals that fungal hyphae (mushroom filaments) may invade the sporangium structures of Arcyria.
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