The Urban Pantheist

Now that's a big dog vomit slime mold. I'm guessing the potted plant was heavily watered, making the myxomycete gather and feed on the organisms produced/attracted by the water.

Beautiful pink beads on a dead log--another collection of slime mold sporangia. This is another common and conspicuous myxomycete by the name of wolf's milk, Lycogala epidendrum.* Before it was blobs it was a tiny river of membrane-less cells, rushing across the wet rotten wood, consuming bacteria and yeasts and other edible bits. When conditions change to less favorable (dryer), it coalesces into globules of orangish pinkish goo. As they goo turns into powdery spores it changes into purplish brownish droplets. Then the spores are released into the air, like miniature puffball mushrooms.

* "Wolf's milk on wood"

It's been too dry in Massachusetts to see any fungi or slime molds--except in our compost container! This is Fuligo septica*, the "scrambled egg" or "dog vomit" slime mold. It's a weird organism, composed of millions of individual crawling cells acting together as a collective creature, eating bacteria and other organic matter as it travels. Eventually it finishes its journey and the mass changes from a foamy blob into a mass of spores that can continue the trip elsewhere. Fuligo septica has been a favorite on this blog for many years.


The black thing at the leading edge of the slime mold is a piece of plastic broken off the compost container.

* literally "Rotten soot"

At the end of the last Urban Nature Walk my friend dedhamoutdoors suggested we walk near Little Wigwam Pond (this is pronounced "little wiggum pond" in order to differentiate locals from carpetbaggers). A couple days later she said she found sundew plants there, and I said "sounds good! you're leading!" or words to that effect.

This first picture shows the group exploring life along the train tracks.

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Most of these Brooklyn Nature post pics are going to from Prospect Park, a nearly 600 acre Olmsted landscape, of which I explored a few hundred square feet. Alexis and I first looked at very early on Sunday morning, before the wreckage of Saturday night festivities had been cleared away. Here's the base of a planter, delightfully overgrown with moss and weeds.

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I don't know about you but I've been seeing a lot of our old friend Fuligo septica lately. Mostly I've been finding it old and dry on wood chips. Once I flicked it hard with my finger and got my fingertip covered in spores. I tried to think of something mischievous do do with my spore-dusted digit, but in the end I just wiped it off. It's not like it's hard to find the species around--I don't need to sneak it into places.


I caught this batch early in its life as it crawled through a bed of moss on a rotten log. I don't usually find it looking this much like scrambled eggs, so this was nice.

For the last two years this weird thing has been happening in a few patches of the lawn. From eye level it looks like someone spilled a dark gray milkshake on the grass ("grass" ha ha our yard is mostly weeds). Get down to where I like to look at things and you can see the structure of it. Rather than a fungus, which lives in what feeds on, this looks like something just resting on the surface of the leaves. Some of the affected plants look a little weird and dried-out but not like they're being destroyed or fed on. Our best guess is that this is the final stage of a slime mold, but we haven't seen it before we started seeing it in our yard.

EDITED TO ADD: well I posted this about an hour ago and since then have identified this as the turfgrass slime mold Physarum cinereum. There isn't much information out there, except that its habitat seems to be mowed lawns, and it is very widely distributed. Wikipedia's dumb entry describes it as a "pathogen" while everyone else points out that it doesn't harm the plants upon which it grows. Like all slime molds, the organism crawls across the surface of stuff, consuming bacteria and other little edible morsels.



A close-up of the growth on a leaf of narrowleaf plantain.

EDITED TO ADD: This pdf from Texas A&M has more information, including the assertion that the slime mold may cause damage to plants simply by blocking the amount of light that reaches the leaves. That's probably why the plants in these photos look a little stressed or withered.

I went for a perfectly pleasant walk in the Dedham Town Forest today, but I got home and looked at my pictures and some of them are pretty off-putting. This first one is just an old sign indicating part of the "fitness trail," but it feels very foreboding to me. Be warned, this series includes at least one very unpleasant photograph.

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Salmonberry.

This penultimate series of vacation snaps is mostly from in and around Forest Park, which, at "5,100 wooded acres [is] the largest, forested natural area within city limits in the United States." Some are from very close by Council Crest Park, which offers some nice views.
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The trailing edge of dog vomit slime mold. Conditions appear to be ideal for the appearance of this myxomycete this week. I've seen it in four or five different locations, on stumps as well as the usual woodchip habitats I'm used to seeing it on. toThe 365 urban species entry for this species (linked above) is from two weeks from this date. More or less the same, I suppose. I think heat and humidity must be the factors that induce it to appear.