John C. writes: Tidying up in the garden a couple of days ago I noticed some white deposits on stalks in my leaf-mould bin. It would have been easy to dismiss them as ‘just mould’ but I decided to look more closely – if you don’t look, you don’t find! – and what I found, though small, was extraordinary and really rather beautiful.
Holding one of the (very fragile) leaf stalks up to the light I could see some small spiky growths. A 10x hand lens confirmed that they were the sporangia (spore-bearing bodies) of some sort of slime mould, with white stalks and iridescent heads. Some photographs revealed their fantastical beauty (see main picture). I had seen pictures on the internet of iridescent sporangia but these were the first that I had found – at the bottom of my garden!
In general slime moulds are difficult to identify, but these are unambiguously Diachea leucopodia. I caught these just a little bit too late because they had started to dehisc (shed their spores) and the peridia (containers for the spores) were breaking up. Nevertheless, they are quite extraordinary to look at, even though they are only a millimetre or two tall.
It just goes to show what you can find if you look. Needless to say, the tidying up didn’t get finished….but why bother when there are things like this to look at?
John Cobb, 30 June 2023
Members are encouraged to ‘blog’ any interesting finds by sending a photograph and some text to Blog(at)thefieldclub.org.uk.
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