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| False puffballs 2011 |
Apart from
the wolves we also have shape shifters or slime moulds. From what little I understand these organisms (or
creatures?) start life as a single cell amoeba. After mating they form zygotes
which in turn develop into plasmodium. The joys of Wikipedia mean you can
quickly cross reference all these bits of jargon so here’s what’s said about
plasmodium:
an amoeboid,
multinucleate and naked mass of protoplasm having many diploid nuclei and
is the result of many nuclear divisions without cytokinesis... (So
now you know!) .....When the food supply
wanes, the plasmodium will migrate to the surface of its substrate and
transform into rigid fruiting bodies. The fruiting bodies or sporangia are what
we commonly see; they superficially look like fungi or moulds but are not
related to the true fungi. These sporangia will then release spores which hatch
into amoebae to begin the life cycle again
I knowingly
encountered my first slime mould on 29th April 2011, it was the False Puffball,
Enteridium lycoperdon, about
three to four metres off the ground on the shaded side of the trunk of an oak
tree .
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| False Puffball 6th May 2012 |
I have been keeping
an eye out for my friend or friends who eventually re-appeared a couple of
trees away but at least a week later than last year. Are they later because of
the cold weather or were they slower eating the available food?
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False puffball 11th May 2012
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If you want
to see them they’ll be around until about 20
th May after which time
they will have released their spores and all you’ll see will look like the dried
remains of a mudball. The tree is
opposite Coed y Bleiddiau cottage come railway halt at map reference
6642441746. This is what they looked like on 6
th May 2012:
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