With the onslaught of rain in the area lately, I've found a plethora of species of fungi including mushrooms, molds and lichen sprouting up. It never ceases to amaze me at how much there is to learn. I can only hope to grasp the basics of what I can, and move on to the next. I just can't imagine I'll ever have enough time to learn and understand all of the wonders of this world within my life-time - and to think all of this is just in my back yard, what's beyond is incomprehensibly vast.
Spotted this Slime Mold (Common Name: Chocolate Tube Slime, Genus: Stemonitis, Species: Axifera) growing in the back yard (southwest Louisiana). This is its fruiting stage, where it creates a stalk, and a weaved sac (capillitium), that contains tiny spores. The germinating amoeboid gamete spores fuse into zygotes becoming a crawling and sprawling plasmodium slime, that later produces more spore filled sacs. They consume decomposing matter, like dead wood and leaves. On the tree of life, being neither a plant or an animal, molds are in the kingdom Protista.
