After the long drought, we have taken on tropical storms, with rain most days. Plant growth is rampant, and the lawn mower has come out of its summer/autumn/winter retirement.
But amongst all the green I spot a flash of colour in the grass. Yellow.
Close up, it resembles several blobs of crumbed, artificially yellow battered takeaway food! But the strands of slime give it away: the first slime mould of 2020 in my yard.
This one looks like the ’Dog’s Vomit’ slime mould.
If you haven’t struck such an oddity before, this is one of a very strange and long misunderstood group of organisms (Fuligo). While no longer classed with fungi, they are included in my Fungi field guide (by A.M.Young).
It tells me they can produce cells that can ‘move about actively and ingest food rather like an amoeba. This cell feeds and reproduces by simple fission until there are perhaps thousands of daughter cells. A chemical signal then causes these cells to combine and form the fruiting structure…’.
I always find them slightly creepy.
My book says this one’s common name is Flowers of Tan, but Dog’s Vomit is much more apt.
Several days later the yellow has become a greyish mauve; now more likely to be mistaken for dried dog’s turds…
But it is not the only slimy visitor after the rain. In a much-horse-manured garden bed, crisp white snow crystals cluster and clump over a stem of my grapevine, again the slimy threads giving it away.
Others transform horse poo into snowballs. Or I could go with the food analogy and say powdered sugar…
An older one is already less snowy and within days they are all a less notable brown. Toasted desiccated coconut?
No wonder I continue to be astonished at the intricacies and varieties that Nature holds, and sometimes shows, especially the ephemeral ones. I need another lifetime to discover more of them…
Great to see another gem of observation.