Sighting 3385030
Scrambled egg slime at Holder, ACT
Identification history
| Fuligo septica | 17 Nov 2017 | Heino | ||
| Unverified | 14 Nov 2017 | timbo |
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User's notes
In my garden in Holder. I think its called Shotgun fungus. Its on sugar cane mulch, and the weather has been wet and warm.
5 comments
Heino
wrote:
15 Nov 2017
Not a fungus but a slime mould (or, technically, a myxomycete) and a very plausible guess as to species is Fuligo septica. At the moment it looks like it's changing from the mobile phase to the stationary sporing stage. If it doesn't rain over the next day or so you might see it complete its development. If it's Fuligo septica you'd end up with a mass of powdery, blackish-purple spores held within a thin and brittle casing. So, keep an eye on it and it may be worth another photo.
timbo
wrote:
17 Nov 2017
2nd picture, 24 hours later, its changed into a little pile which resembles pooh
Heino
wrote:
17 Nov 2017
It looks like the second photo shows the outer casing developing. In Fuligo septica that casing may be white, pale to dark brown or purple or the odd other shade or two. You say that it had disappeared 48 hours later and that makes me think that this colony completed the mobile-to-sporing stage development. In the sporing stage the casing is very brittle and easily broken by heat (such as that of a bright, warm, sunny day) or impact (e.g. falling twig, raindrop, animal). Once the casing has broken the spores are easily dispersed by breezes or washed away by rain. If you look closely at the spot where there has been a sporing stage, you may see a dark coating, since a good number of spores may remain trapped by mulch, debris, rough ground etc. If you see anything (and how much you see) depends on just how much wind/rain there has been, the roughness of the surface and so on. Occasionally I’ve seen a slime mould in which the mobile-to-sporing change had been aborted, leaving a shapeless blob of more or less homogenous texture. Given what you’ve seen, over the 48 hours, I’ll call this Fuligo septica since that is highly plausible – but there’s still a chance I’m wrong.
Location information
- Coordinates 149.040856-35.332803
- Altitude 591.0m
- Places Holder, ACT
Sighting information
- 1 Abundance
- 15 Nov 2017 07:14 AM Recorded on
- timbo Recorded by
-
Collections
timbo Canberra & Southern Tablelands NatureMapr Fuligo septica Slime Moulds
Species information
- Fuligo septica Scientific name
- Scrambled egg slime Common name
- Not Sensitive
- Local native
- Non-invasive or negligible
- Up to 1483.99m Recorded at altitude