Salmon Eggs Slime Mold
I found these tiny orange balls growing on a decaying pine stump in the woods on September 20, 2024. In addition to growing exposed on the bare wood, they also were growing nestled down in the moss.
These are fruiting bodies of a slime mold. Looking at them a bit closer, we can see that some are kind of torn up and deflated.
They may have burst open and spread their spores already, but looking a bit more closely at the bottom of the first picture, I see what looks like either a caterpillar or a beetle grub eating one of them.
Unfortunately, I didn’t see the grub at the time and so don’t have a better picture. But it is possible that those top deflated fruiting bodies were eaten by something like this.
This is pretty clearly one of the species of slime mold known as “Salmon Eggs”, likely the species Trichia decipiens. There are a bunch of other species in the genus Trichia, many of which probably look very similar, but T. decipiens is the only one I am seeing any particular number of pictures of.
Slime molds are not actually fungi, or exactly animals or plants either. They are basically a type of colonial amoeba. In the early stages they often crawl around in the leaf litter and decaying wood as single cells, feeding on bacteria and fungi. But then, when conditions are right, they form up into large colonies that first flow around as a “plasmoid”, which ultimately form up into fruiting bodies that generate spores. The spores then get dispersed to new locations on the wind.
Windblown spores get around pretty well, so a lot of slime molds have very wide ranges. This particular species is evidently found in woods and moist regions worldwide, so you are likely to find them wherever you are (unless you are in a desert).