You might remember that on 18 June I blogged about Wolf’s milk, one of the Lycogala species of slime moulds, and noted that I couldn’t positively identify it until I saw the colour of its spores. Well, I’ve been back to recheck these slime balls. They took a bit of finding, as the dense tree canopy of the woodland makes the area quite dark and their change of colour as the slime balls have matured made them blend in with the log they were growing on, as you can see below.

The good news is that I have been able to identify them. I ‘popped’ one – not a bad thing for the slime as this released its spores for distribution – and found the spore colour to have a pinkish hue, which confirmed the species as Lycogala terrestre.