What a difference a day makes.

The raspberry slime mould that I collected a couple of days ago, and which I decided to keep as a pet, has settled in well. It, or should it be they, has decided that conditions are so perfect that it/they should start to reproduce. Overnight it has darkened and hardened and its sporangia have started to produce quadrillions of spores. In due course they will burst, releasing the spores into the air to be wafted away, to who knows where, to start new colonies.

The "extra" photograph shows a fungus, not one the larger mushrooms that I usually photograph, but something rather smaller and less showy, a mould.

Moulds, or molds as our American cousins would have it, are fungi that grow in the form of a mass of multi-celled filaments called hyphae. There are thousands of known species of moulds and so I have no idea as to the identity of this species growing on a strawberry, from the deep, neglected recesses of our 'fridge, sitting on an alabaster plate.