Slime mold

I believe this is not the leavings of some unfortunate animal but rather the aethelium of a slime mold. That is, the ‘fruiting’ mushroom equivalent of an organism that seems to defy description or placement in our normal typologies of plant, animal or fungus.

These are various quotes from different wiki pages with bits of me.

Slime molds were formerly classified as fungi but are no longer considered part of that kingdom

they are grouped within the paraphyletic group referred to as kingdom Protista.

A protist (/ˈproʊtɪst/) is any eukaryotic organism (that is, an organism whose cells contain a cell nucleus) that is not an animal, plant, or fungus.

Slime mold seems an unfortunate appellation for Fuligo septica. My brief tactile encounters suggest more a texture of an overly stiff whipped cream ( on the cusp of turning to an airy butter) with those little baubles you find in nursery grown plant compost that retain moisture. I expected some kind of fecal or vomitatious smell but fuligo septica seems odourless.

This (see extra) is the offspring, fruit, spore hoard of a very strange organism. An amoeba like structure of many thousands of cell nuclei in a great merged cell that lives within the soil.

This structure is referred to as a form a plasmodium, a multinucleate mass of undifferentiated cells that may move in an ameboid-like fashion during the search for nutrients.

Myxomycete plasmodia are multinucleate masses of protoplasm that move by cytoplasmic streaming.

If conditions become dry, then the plasmodium will form a sclerotium, essentially a dry and dormant state. If conditions become moist again, then the sclerotium absorbs water and an active plasmodium is restored. When the food supply wanes, the Myxomycete plasmodium will enter the next stage of its life cycle forming haploid spores, often in a well-defined sporangium or other spore-bearing structure.

Atsushi Tero of Hokkaido University grew Physarum in a flat wet dish, placing the mold in a central position representing Tokyo and oat flakes surrounding it corresponding to the locations of other major cities in the Greater Tokyo Area. As Physarum avoids bright light, light was used to simulate mountains, water and other obstacles in the dish. The mold first densely filled the space with plasmodia, and then thinned the network to focus on efficiently connected branches. The network strikingly resembled Tokyo's rail system.[20][21]

The Creeping Garden is a 2014 British documentary film featuring various kinds of slime molds. The film uses retro cinematography and electronic music to enhance a connection between slime molds and sci-fi films such as Phase IV, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and The Blob.

See here for trailer http://www.creepinggarden.com/

The plasmodium eventually transforms into a sponge-like aethalium, analogous to the spore-bearing fruiting body of a mushroom; which then degrades, darkening in color, and releases its dark-colored spores. F. septica produces the largest aethalium of any slime mold.[8] This species is known to have its spores dispersed by beetles (family Latridiidae).[9]

You couldn’t make it up