Is there a Texan myxomycologist in the house?

[urbpan]

Or anyone else that knows their way around slime molds and such? We found these little guys who look an awful lot like Lycogala to me, but I've never seen wolf's milk grow directly on soil before. I've always seen it on wood. What gives?



cottonmanifesto squeezed one yesterday and the requisite pink goo came out. Today she squoze one and it was powdery.

Comments

[larksdream]

Off topic, but are you familiar with the What's That Bug? page? I especially like their Bug Love section. Search down to the slug picture... it also refers to more mating slugs here. Duuuuuude...

[urbpan.livejournal.com]

I am familiar with that page (it pops up on google searches for "crane fly" and "american dog tick" and so on) but I hadn't seen their homage to bug sex. It's great! Best new porn site on the internet--I think I'll make a post to it. Thanks for the tip!

[by-steph.livejournal.com]

Ahaha! "Squoze" is an awesome word by the way. Isn't used nearly enough these days.

My "expertise" is in cellular slime molds unfortunately. You have a true slime mold (acellular) that I would agree is Lycogala. I brought some of the fruiting bodies into the lab once when I found some growing on wet mulch under some cedars. I observed the same gooey pink spores that turned dry and crumbly after sitting in a petri dish for awhile. With cellular slime molds, the spores remain intact in the sorocarp due to water cohesion. When they are fresh, they are simple to disperse but as they age the sorocarp dehydrates and the spores don't disperse as easily. With true slime molds, the spores are held in a cellulose matrix rather than just a ball of moisture. I don't know if the progression you see is a breakdown in the cellulose matrix or if it is a loss of water that you are seeing (or heck, both! or neither!)

My cellular slime molds don't feed directly on rotting cellulose like the holozoic true slime molds can. The soil supports bacteria that the individual amoebae phagocytise and then only form a slug after they have exhausted the bacterial supply and begin to starve. The slug with cooperating yet intact cells migrate to the surface of the soil where birds and rain will disperse the spores. The true slime molds also form a slug, yet the cells do not remain autonomous, they in fact become one large cell with many nuclei. It's possible your true slime mold cells were happily growing on some decaying wood (where I have also only ever seen them) but either the food source was exhausted or the cells were displaced and now they have aggregated in an attempt to disperse themselves to another food source.

Nematodes, Dictyostelium caveatum, and the diploid sexual cell (usually my babies are little haploids), are the major predators for cellular slime molds. Once again I'm not sure how much nematodes bother the guys you found but I'll bet Dictyostelium caveatum would try to eat a myxamoebae as they are even happy to eat mammalian cells.

The true slime molds also have a stage in their life where they can become flagellated in moist conditions. The cellular slime molds do not do that.

[by-steph.livejournal.com]

Er, that should be "I'll bet Dictyostelium caveatum would try to eat other myxamoebae..."

[ndozo.livejournal.com]

cool!

[cavalaxis]

I love it when you talk dirty. ;)

[urbpan.livejournal.com]

Thanks so much for your expertise!