Wolf’s-Milk Slime Mold, maybe?
The pine plantation west of our house was thinned back in 2014, and the stumps left behind from the cut trees have gotten pretty rotten and punky. And, on September 19 of 2020, we found these little pink fungusy things popping up between the growth rings.
They are basically little pink balls that look like they are coming out of old insect holes.
And off to the right side, and a bit out of focus, there are some fungusoid balls that look similar, except that they are plumper and kind of a gray color.
So, I did a search for “pink bubble fungus on stumps”, and promptly found a bunch of pictures of similar-looking things, which are identified as “Wolf’s-Milk Slime” or “Toothpaste Slime”, Lycogala epidendrum. These do indeed grow in pink when fresh, and gradually turn an olive gray as they ripen and get ready to produce spores.
However, they are apparently not fungus!
Rather, they are one of the slime molds, which are their own thing. They are in the phylum Amoebozoa, which makes them relatives of the blobular amoebas that we all heard about in elementary school biology classes. You know, the ones that flow around and engulf things. Slime molds spend part of their life crawling around as single cells, but then they aggregate together to make fruiting bodies like the ones we see here to generate spores. The slime molds with fruiting bodies big enough to see with the naked eye are the ones in the class Myxogastria.
The typical slime mold lifecycle is that first the spores hatch out single-celled amoeba-type things that crawl around eating whatever they find small enough to engulf in decaying matter. The initial cells are haploid (only one set of chromosomes) but if they encounter another cell of the correct mating type, they can fuse to make a diploid “plasmodium” with a full set of chromosomes. The plasmodium then crawls around and grows, but instead of splitting off new independent cells, it just gets bigger and generates more cell nuclei with no cell membranes between them. So, in a sense they are still a single cell (because there is no way to tell where one cell leaves off and another begins), which looks like a sheet of slime that crawls into crevices and across surfaces.
When the plasmodium uses up the food available locally, it matures into fruiting bodies to make spores, and the cycle repeats. So, what I have pictures of here are the final life stage of the slime molds that have been devouring the things that were decomposing these stumps. Different slime mold species have fruiting bodies of different sizes, shapes, and colors, but these particular ones are pink balls.
I gather that slime molds are extremely common, but don’t get noticed much because half the time they just look like some slimy gunk in the decomposing leaf litter, and the other half the time they look like tiny mushrooms.
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“The plasmodium then crawls around and grows, but instead of splitting off new independent cells, it just gets bigger and generates more cell nuclei with no cell membranes between them.”
Dude, that’s wild. It’s like they’re the laziest of the microscopic creatures. They can’t even be bothered with cell walls.
Would the mites in your next post dine on them?