Imagine my surprise when I went out to the garden this morning and discovered a number of tiny (think smaller than the average apple seed, maybe 3 mm or 1/8 inch). round, and pillow shaped, puffball-looking things seemingly scattered around in one of my garden plots.
It turns out these are not puffballs (a form of mushroom), they just look and act similar to them. Nor are they some version of a mold. They are one of a great number of odd (and quite fascinating) creatures known as “Slime Molds”. The ones in my garden are harmless young fruiting bodies of the slime-mold “Lycogala Epidendrum”, also known as a “Myxogastrid Amoeba”, “Wolf’s Milk Mushroom”, or “Toothpaste Slime”. Poke one of the young ones with something like a stick or a knife, and you will find that it is filled with bright orangish-pink, sticky goo (presumably either the “wolf’s milk” or the “toothpaste”). The bright orange color is short-lived. These will quickly turn dark brown (and much less noticeable) in color.
Biologists are mystified by Slime-molds and don’t know how to classify them exactly. (Could they be some sort of alien creature?) They can solve mazes, find minimum energy solutions to networking problems, and move around at will, without having a brain, nervous system, or – well – any other parts to themselves at all.. There are 800+ types of slime molds and they can be found in every color of the rainbow, except – due to not having any chlorophyll – green. They come in a wide variety of sizes, from microscopic to almost 15 feet across (inspiration for the movie “The Blob”, perhaps?).
They live by feeding on the bacteria, fungus, and yeasts found in such places as piles of decaying leaves on a forest floor, or other sources of composting bacteria – for example, well rotted wood or garden soil.
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Here is a great picture of the old and new versions of this slime mold’s fruiting bodies (sporangia) shown together by Michael and Melissa Kuo from http://Midwestnaturalist.com
EDIT: Well, that was quick. 6 hours later and they’ve gone from “young” to “old”. If you look at the garden now, you can barely distinguish them from just plain dirt. If someone didn’t know what they were looking for, and know where to look, they’d probably have gotten missed completely.
