A slime mould and a flower

Today we had the first snow of autumn which turned the lawn white and produced a thin crust of ice on the standing water.  So it was a surprise to find a whole heap of flowers blooming.  Literally, a whole heap, as my walk took me past a heap of topsoil in the working area/dump at the back of the local golf course. I don't know where the soil had come from but it was covered with Bugloss (Anchusa arvensis or now Lycopsis arvensis.) The older name is the one you'll need for most field guides if you want to look it up.

A heap of Bugloss

It is a very bristly plant, and if it reminds you a bit of Borage that's because they are both in the Borage family, Boraginaceae,  along with Comfrey and Forget-me-nots.  They all have 5 petals, usually joined into a tube and encased in a calyx of 5 sepals. When it comes to the seeds though, each flower produces 4 seeds or nutlets. The description in my Wild Flower Key book says " bristles with bulbous bases" and flower "throat closed by 5 hairy scales." This is difficult to see with a hand lens but you can see these features with a x20 microscope.

Blue arrow showing bristle with bulbous base, and centre of Bugloss flower with hairy scales.

Whilst doing some tidying up in the garden, I came across a slime mould growing on a lilac sucker. I've written about slime moulds in a previous post as they don't fit into the neat categories we like to use such as animal, plant or fungus. I found a really good series of articles at  https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/lifesci/outreach/slimemold/    including how to grow one and keep it as a pet (!) I decided to cut the piece of lilac and take photos every day. Here is the life cycle of a slime mould (from the site above):

 Here is the one I found on  4 November 2024.

You can see the original slime phase (plasmodia) at the bottom of the stick. I was hoping to see some dramatic changes and it did change to start with, from an yellow fingery mass to a white one.

The same slime mould a day later

However, since then it hasn't changed (now 17 November), though I was hoping it would go black and develop some spores. But I did manage to find another clump in the same area of the garden that had already started making spores.

I shook it over a glass slide and the spores looked like black dust.  Under the microscope they looked like spheres ornamented with lots of tiny spikes. 

Spherical slime mould spores

They measured about 10-11 microns across.  A micron is a millionth of a metre or a thousandth of a millimetre so 100 of the spores would fit into a millimetre. Tiny! This spells the end of the slime mould but the spores will disperse and germinate if they land somewhere damp and will hatch into a kind of one celled creature called an amoeba (do you remember them from O level biology?). When it finds a suitable mate they will merge together and start another slime mould. I thought they were quite rare as I don't see them very often, but apparently the spores are everywhere and if you get some rotten wood and  keep it damp in a container, you will probably start a slime mould growing.  Go to the Warwick site for more details!

 

Arran and Arms

Partway through April, my husband and I joined a group from the British lichen society on Arran for a few days of lichen hunting. Although my husband is quite happy for me to go lichen hunting, he spent his time cycling. The weather was rather unpredictable resulting in our ferry from Ardrossan being cancelled with an hour’s notice and deferred for two days to 7 o’clock in the morning. After the initial panic, we managed to drive to Troon and get an alternative ferry, with a sigh of relief. We were very fortunate has the ferry after that was cancelled as well, and some people had to wait until the following day to get over.

 

As most of you will know, Arran is an island on the West Coast of Scotland. Although small, it has a range of interesting habitats from a mountain, Goat Fell, to plenty of coastline and Glens. Each habitat has a different selection of lichens, and I particularly enjoyed the coastal visit to Kildonan which included dinosaur footprints in the rock. 

I am not familiar with coastal lichens as Newtonmore is a long way from the sea but there was a big expanse of Dermatocarpon miniatum on the boulders where water ran down. I don't know why it is called miniatum as the lobes weren't mini at all, being over an inch across. There was another species of Dermatocarpon in my last post which again was in a place where water ran down the rocks.

 

Another visit was to an old graveyard. Graveyards are very popular with lichenologists because the gravestones are made of different rocks and lichens have their own preferences for the acidity or alkalinity of the rock they grow on. This means that you get a good range of species in a small area.

Noses to the gravestone!

 On returning to Newtonmore, I went for a walk along the Spey to advise on where they might put wildflower information boards. It is bit early for flowers on the Wildcat trail down by the Spey but there were some interesting fungi.

A morel

One was a morel with a contorted top and the other was a  puzzle until I got home and could look it up.

Moon Poop

 Apologies for the awful picture but there were two large hand size white blobs on an old Alder tree. On touching one, it had a skin but was squishy inside. A bit like custard that had set in the jug.  Research revealed that it was not a fungus but a slime mould, Reticularia lycoperdon or False Puffball or even better, Moon Poop! I had plans to go back and take pictures when it had developed more and produced spores but as you will find out in a moment this was not to be.

 The next day I went to a meeting in Strathpeffer of the HBRG, the Highland biological recording group and heard some interesting talks about beetles. There was a speaker called Ashleigh Whiffin who is a curator of the insect collection at the National Museums of Scotland. Ash loves her carrion beetles and gave a really interesting talk. She has a YouTube video available here. Carrion beetles bury little corpses and use them to feed their young.  After the meeting I went to do some shopping in Inverness and had a bit of a disaster when I tripped on an uneven paver in the car park and broke my arm. I am attempting to dictate this blog post but hope I will be able to type again in a few weeks.

When is a fungus not a fungus?

Dog Vomit, Wolf's milk... there are some very imaginative names for things that look like a fungus.  But appearances can be deceptive.  Here is an example of something I saw whilst walking round Loch Imrich (Newtonmore) yesterday. It was growing on a rotting tree stump and although it was quite small it was an startling colour:

The tree stump

Getting closer

A closer look showed it was made up of lots of small fingers and looked a bit like a sea anemone or coral. My guess is that this is a slime mould.  These are fascinating organisms which are neither plant nor fungus but single celled organisms which spend most of their lives separately and invisible to the naked eye, but then come together when there is plenty of food available and produce these fruiting bodies like the one in the photo.  Soon it will change its appearance and produce spores ( I might go and have a look tomorrow!).  Looking at photos online, this one might be Tubifera ferruginosa, Raspberry slime mould.

I think I found the Dog Vomit slime mould in the woods by Wolftrax - another startlingly bright colour.

I did go and look at the Loch Imrich slime mould again and it has now changed to a muddy brown. I assume it will be releasing its spores soon.

Slime moulds have fascinating behaviour. Although they have no brain, collectively they can solve mazes in search of food, and can learn. You can read more about them here and see some amazingly beautiful photos of them here

And there is even a video from the BBC here