03 Thursday Jan 2019
Posted in 365DaysWildin2019, nature, winter
I simply can’t resist a nice slime. So, during today’s walk along the Penarth to Lavernock coastal path, when I passed a place where I’ve found this particular slime before – it’s called Comatricha nigra, I checked the bottom of two or three old umbellifer stems before finding this superb specimen.
18 Tuesday Dec 2018
Posted in nature
Who needs artificial Christmas decorations when Mother Nature provides her own … and they’re biodegradable … and they’re available all year round (in the right conditions) … and they’re free!
27 Tuesday Nov 2018
Cosmeston was relatively quiet yesterday. A few Redwings flashed their rusty flanks at me, indignant that I had interrupted their grazing in the west paddock, and a pair of Mistle thrushes screeched their football-rattle call from the tree tops as the Redwings flew up to join them. Carrion crows and Grey squirrels hovered on the periphery, watching as I fed seed to a posse of passerines in Cogan Wood, but the hoped-for Marsh tit did not appear. So, I abandoned the birds, headed up and along the muddy woodland tracks where few people venture, eyes down and searching for fungi. Within minutes, my hand was scratched from reaching too carelessly through brambles, my fingers were filthy from picking up rotting wood to examine more closely, my camera was speckled with dirt from being plonked on the ground for better close-ups, but my reward was this most wonderful slime mould. I don’t know its name but I am a huge admirer of these enigmatic organisms, and this one was a beauty!
22 Monday Oct 2018
Tags
autumn fungi, bracket fungi, dead tree full of fungi, fungi on tree, gilled fungi, Lycogala sp., slime mould
This tree may be dead but it’s teeming with life.
I’m sure it’s chock full of a huge variety of bugs and beetles, slugs and centipedes, and many other mini-beasties, but what caught my eye was the number of different types of fungi it was supporting.
As well as several species of gilled mushrooms, there were also various intriguing brackets, some oozing golden droplets, and a wonderfully vibrant orange Lycogala species of slime mould. Fungi may often be difficult to identify but they never cease to amaze me.
08 Tuesday Aug 2017
I braved the rain showers and intermittent rumbles of thunder for a wander around Cefn Onn Park, in north Cardiff, last weekend. I hadn’t been there for quite a while and, after the recent rains, I had an inkling there might be some fungi around. I was right! There were actually rather a lot of crusty, brackety, slimy, smutty and generally mushroomy things to be found. (No, I’m not going to ID them – I just enjoyed seeing some fungi again.)
20 Friday Jan 2017
Posted in nature
Tags
Arcyria nutans, Ceratiomyxa fruticulosa, Fuligo septica, slime, slime mould, slime mould on the move, Tubifera ferruginosa
Slime mould: NOUN. A simple organism that consists of an acellular mass of creeping jelly-like protoplasm containing nuclei, or a mass of amoeboid cells. When it reaches a certain size it forms a large number of spore cases. Oxford Dictionary
I’ve posted about slime moulds before but they continue to fascinate me and I continue to find more and more of them so I thought I’d share more photos.
30 Sunday Oct 2016
Tags
Brittlestem, Burgundydrop bonnet, fungus, Hairy curtain crust, honey fungus, Oysterling, Porcelain Fungus, slime mould, Trichia varia, Turkeytail
It’s always sad to see a mighty old tree fall, no more to see its bare branches flush with green in early spring or hear the blackbird singing in the evening dusk from its high branches.
This huge old tree came down one wild and stormy night last winter and was soon sawn into manageable, though still huge logs by council staff. Fortunately, those logs were not removed, but merely hauled off the woodland path so, though the tree is dead, its wood is now home to an amazing display of fungi.
I suspect fungi may have contributed to its demise as there is an enormous amount of wood-rotting Honey fungus spouting forth around its roots. It’s a little difficult to separate out this tree and its branches from the surrounding small trees and old stumps but the whole small area is now awash with fungal growth, including Burgundydrop bonnet, Hairy curtain crust and Turkeytail, the Porcelain fungus that I blogged about recently, a species of Oysterling and another of Brittlestem, as well as at least one slime mould, Trichia varia. The poor old tree lives on by providing nutrients to all these other living organisms.
21 Thursday Apr 2016
Posted in nature, nature photography
Tags
False puffball, Lycogala sp., Metatrichia floriformis, Mucilago crustacea, Reticularia lycoperdon, slime mould
Slime moulds are the most fascinating things! The text for today’s post was written by my Glamorgan Fungi Club friend Graham Watkeys, who has very kindly allowed me to quote his words here.
Metatrichia floriformis
‘Usually existing as separate single cells, slime moulds congregate at this time of year (nobody knows how they do this) creating a gooey super-predator consuming everything in their path.
‘The slime mould actively travels, hunting for its food of bacteria, fungi and other organic matter (nobody knows how it does this), a mass of single cells without a nervous system or any kind of brain acting like a single entity (nobody knows how it does this).
‘Out of the chaos of the multitude, order is created, simulating purpose and direction where none exists beyond the relentless need for food.
‘When the food runs out, this conglomeration decides it’s time to reproduce (nobody knows how it does this). The millions of identical cells spontaneously reorganise themselves into a wholly new configuration, creating mushroom-like structures, some become stems, some spores (nobody knows how it does this), the simple becoming complex, the uniform becoming specialised.
‘The spores are released into the wind and the slime mould becomes a disparate unicellular organism again. The world has some extraordinary inhabitants.’
Mucilago crustacea, commonly known as Dog’s vomit
Reticularia lycoperdon (False puffball): new specimen on the left, mature on the right
Lycogala sp.
earthstar 
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