The Urban Pantheist

My friend dedhamoutside and I co-led an Urban Nature Walk in the Dedham Town Forest (previously seen here). This sign is relatively new. On the one hand, it's nice for the town to recognize the Town Forest; on the other, now it's more visible for use and abuse. We set out with the intention to find mushrooms and other living things!

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I saw these little guys from a long way off--they looked almost traffic cone orange! This is wolf's milk slime mold Lycogala epidendrum.


Little cushions look smooth from a distance but are textured close up.

For whatever reason, my pictures of things at Lost Pond from this morning come in pairs. Here is a group of Indian pipe flowers.( Read more... )

Location: Perimeter of Brookline water and sewer division landscaping wood chips.

Urban species #158: Wolf's milk Lycogala epidendrum

A slime mold is a strange organism, stranger even than its name implies. It behaves like an animal, but reproduces like a fungus. It spends much of its life as a mass of protoplasm (properly called a plasmodium), which contains millions of nuclei unbounded by separate cell membranes. This mass slowly moves about on decaying wood, consuming organic particles. At some point when the time is right (or when conditions become dry or the food is depleted), the plasmodium coalesces into a more or less solid fruiting body, and releases spores. The fruiting body stage is the form that is usually encountered (as is the case with true fungi).

In the case of wolf's milk, the fruiting bodies appear as a collection of orangish-pink spheroids. If damaged in this stage, the liquid spore mass oozes out. In time the globules turn purplish, then brown. The spore mass dries out, and the spores disperse.

Slime molds can be alarming in the way that they seem to appear from nowhere, and their name doesn't help. The alternate name "myxomycete" isn't much better, and I've never been able to get away with a short explanation of what these creatures really are. What people need to know is that they are not harmful in any way, and they aren't indicators of anything except wet wood. They crawl around on the wood chips while we are sleeping, and the next day they are pretty little beads of pink goo. Just another urban species that goes on with its business whether we care to notice them, or not.

( click to notice them )

After the brakes were fixed, we continued with our original plan. The Mt. Misery Conservation Area in Lincoln, Mass.

Mt. Misery is described as "a modest hill covered with a dense pine forest," and is a favorite for dog owners in the Metro West area.


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Of course, cross-posted to cottonmanifesto.