Slime mould

Not everyone's cup of tea I know, but I got excited about this. I was photographing some jelly fungus on a dead branch when I spotted these amazing structures. I thought the must be the fruiting bodies of a species of slime mould so I looked elsewhere on the branch and, sure enough, there was a section of the classic slimy yellow plasmodium - the amazing mobile stage of this organism's life cycle. Under the right conditions this protoplasm can stream at a speed of up to 1.35 mm per second, the fastest non-animal organism on the planet. It has also been shown to be able to negotiate mazes.

Slime moulds are wonderful. They were classified along with fungi for a long time, but are now known to be micro-organisms that are completely unrelated and defy any attempt to pigeon-hole them as plants, animals or fungi. Anyway, this one is Badhamia utricularis. It is actually feeding on a fungus that covers a lot of the dead branch. This photograph shows a group of the fruiting bodies, each less than 1 mm across, that look superficially like fungi or moulds, but are in their own wildlife kingdom.