New slimy visitor

In my yard, amidst the green of grass, the brown of strips of windblown bark or fallen leaves, and the black of wallaby poo, you rarely see the colour yellow. Especially a yellow so bright as to resemble plastic.

Naturally it drew me to closer inspection, which revealed small blobs of desiccated plastic.

Aha! Weird things that suddenly appear out of nowhere? Slime moulds!

slime-mould-2

Although I haven’t seen it here, this one appears to be the common Fuligo septica, ‘Flowers of Tan’, ‘resembling a solidifed mass of scrambled egg, often with a small whitish trail leading to it’ says my fungi book. Not that slime moulds are classed with fungi anymore, but I don’t have a book on them alone.

Unlike fungi, they get together on a chemical signal and move, to ingest food like an amoeba.

Curioser and curioser is this world.