Getting the photos of them that you see in this post took hours of prodding, twisting, lighting and post-processing. I completed the process about a week ago, and for the first time ever posted the information on my external blog before steemit in order to more easily be able to share the information with several specialized online communities.
I've posted these photos and the charactistics of these little sporangia to the Slime Mold Collective, the NYMS, and two subreddits specializing in fungi and slime molds respectively. I've read through several field guides in search of an answer, bought a copy of "The Kingdom Of Fungi" in the hopes of clarity, and then scoured more online sources than I'm going to cite to below.
In the end, there are certain informed, broad conclusions I can form about these organisms, but not many specific ones. This is likely to be a problem for me going forward at this scale. The fact seems to be that the more myopically you zoom in and search for tiny myco/myxo species, the less information is readily available about what you find.
There may be a mid to long term answer to this dilemma. The NYMS is going to be joining the North American Mycoflora Project, which will be encouraging amateurs to collect, document and send specimens for DNA testing. I will be attending an NYMS meeting on the topic in late January and, in time, hope to learn the protocols for the project and submit my finds.
When I've previously found fungi and documented them with photographs, they've been large organisms, relatively speaking. They are clearly visible with the naked eye and holdable in ones hand.
When I first found a slime mold in the wild, it was much smaller, but still easily visible with the naked eye, so long as I was looking closely for it.
With these strange objects, the same cannot really be said. The above photo is the home of these weirdos. What can you see in this distant photo of the wood. There is a white/grayish mold around the edges. And, if you took liberties, you might say that the edges are also, ever so slightly, textured?
Around the wood, the mold has been disappearing, except for this corner where it still clings to the surface. We an see now that the mold consists of individual strands. These are, more than likely, hyphae, or asexual structures that grow and conglomerate together to form the sorts of moldy fuzzes you sometimes see on food or plants.
This photo is telling in a number of ways. First, in terms of the characteristics of this fuzz, we can now be certain it consists of interwoven, filamentous strands of white hyphae. It looks almost like a mycelium of sorts - and in a sense it is. More than likely, the final blackberry structures are directly related to this white fuzz - and were formed by it in the same way that a mushroom cap spawns out of a mass of mycelium.
If you look up at the first photo of wood, on the edges, you can see they are textured, in addition to a little fuzzy. I believe those textured areas are the developing sporangia, or spore bearing masses which I have visualized here. However I was not looking closely enough at the time to investigate because I simply wasn't looking for something so tiny. Slime molds are much bigger, in general, than these little guys.
This photo is also relevant to the macro-photographic process in general. If you look on the far bottom left of the photo, you can see an area of distortion. I have kept this in demonstratively. The way this, and the other photos you see here work, is I take anywhere from 5-15 photos of a subject. In each photo a small slice of the subject is in focus. Then I run all the photos through an awesome piece of software called Zerene Stacker. The program identifies the in focus areas, aligns the various photos, and then stacks them on top of each other. The result is a photo that is entirely in focus, albeit with some visual distortions resulting from the cumulative realignment of each photo.
Because the objects being photographed are so minuscule, the really difficult part is finding them at the most useful angle and lighting them appropriately. Thankfully the modularity of the microscope I bought allows for a great flexibility in both these regards. Nonetheless, it is fair to say that the photographic process is now taking as long to produce, in and of itself, as many of my older posts took in their entirety.
But the most amazing part of this, from my perspective, was at the roughly 2 minute mark when a second bug enters the frame and we watch it apparently eating the hyphae. Most remarkable are the three or four black dots stuck to the bugs rear end.
Something about that single piece of information drove home most concretely for me that this tiny piece of wood bears its own flourishing ecosystem. There are multiple life cycles playing out inside of this petri dish, with at least two disparate organisms surviving interconnectedly, one with the other.
At this point, most of the white filaments had disappeared completed, and in there place were left these small black dots. It was the discovery of these small stains, and micro structures that first spurred me to get the dissecting scope. I was about to throw this piece of bark out as a failure, when I noticed structures so small they were barely visible with my hand lens.
Each of these sporangia are sub-millimeter in size, in all dimensions. That would make the individual black sacs absolutely tiny. Nonetheless, I was still able to visualize them pretty well - at least well enough to get a clear sense of the sporangia's general structure.
The stem portion appears to be yellowish in some of the pitctures, as here, and the sacs black in color. You can see why I refer to these as blackberries.
Generally, the fruiting bodies varied in this characteristic based on where they were placed on the piece of wood. The structures growing on the sides of the wood, perpendicular to the floor, had stalks, while the structures growing on top of the wood did not.
this photo also give some insight into the dispersal process of the black orbs. You can see how both structures have begun shedding the black orbs. I don't know whether the beetle creatures we saw before eat these spores or simply pick them up in passing.
You can clearly see the remnants of the interwoven strands interspersed among the structures. You can see also just ho prolifically these guys propagate. There is no shortage of them, and more than likely each individual black sac contains multiple spores, just because they seem too large to be individual spores themselves.
However, this is not totally implausible either, and it leads us to the ultimate question here, what the hell are we looking at. My first instinct, itself the result of a certain observational bias, was that they must be slime molds. One possibility that came up repeatedly was Polycephalum Physarum, a slime mold which creates globular looking, blackberryish sporangia in maturity.
However, this notion makes no sense. First, the scale of these fruiting bodies is totally off. They are WAY to small to be P.physarum. But, more importantly, this idea simply ignores the fungal mold-like hyphae that both covered the entire piece of wood for a time, and which can still be seen interspersed with the fruiting bodies.
Slime molds do not develop from hyphae. They develop from an amoeba-like state, into a plasmodium that can move around, slime-like, and finally maturing into a spore bearing body called a sporangia. Because these things began life as a fuzzy mold like substance, slime molds are basically out the window.
A user on reddit was the first to inform me that even rudimentary fungal molds can progress beyond simply fuzz and develop fruiting bodies. Further reading as presented to prime, if broad, candidates for where this particular organism falls in the scheme of things.
One possibility is that it is a form of zygomycota. These are most frequently associated with sugary substrates, like strawberries. However, it seems unlikely that these are zygomycotes, because most of those species are known for their singly spore bearing strands in maturity, whereas these guys had a very different final structure.
Which leads me to think these are one of the multitudes of ascomycota molds. The Ascomycota fungi represent their own division in the kingdom of Fungi, and represent the majority of known species. These fungi are primarily distinguished, morphologically, by the microscopic presence of spore bearing structures called asci - derived from the greek word for a "sac". Spores are formed within these asci and then, by some means or another, eventually dispersed.
We've only really covered one ascomycete species here, and that was Cordyceps capitata. Whether this organism also falls into the division might be illuminated through microscopy.
They are on the large size, for sure. So large that I felt fairly certain they were not individual spores, but spore bearing sacs, or themselves essentially macroscopically visible asci.
Moreover, you can also see the hint of structures inside of the circle, both behind the outer skin and poking out from within it.
This image supports the idea that these black orbs are spore bearing sacs, which subsequently break open and release their spore mass. It also supports the idea that I need a better compound microscope. With a 100x oil immersion lens I would be able to tell SO MUCH MORE about these spores. With that in mind, I will be upgrading sooner rather than later.
Photos Are My Own
Microscopic photos were taken using an AmScope SM-4TZ-144A dissecting microscope and an AMScope M150B entry level microscope. The camera lens is also AMScope, MU300.
Information Sources
The bulk of the information in this case was derived from a multi-part posting of these photos and the circumstances of their being taken on several forums involving the study of Fungi and Slime Molds. The information was shared on The Slime Mold Collective, The NYMS Facebook page, and the subreddits /r/mycology and /r/slimemolds. Users from the slime mold collective and reddit both expressed doubt that this was a slime mold and was in fact a fungal mold.
Efforts were made to identify the species using the following books:
[1] Myxomycetes A Hand Book of Slime Molds By Steven L Stephenson and Henry Stempen
[2]The Audubon Society Field Guide To North American Mushrooms by Gary Lincoff
[3]Mushrooms Demystified By David Arora
[4]And, at the suggestion of members of the NYMS, "The Kingdom of Fungi", by Jens H Peterson, which I purchased especially in response to the quandary of this and other small species. It has not revealed precise species, but has shed light on these and other questions. It is one of the most beautiful books I've ever owned, and I can't suggest strongly enough that you all purchase it.
[5]Zygomycota
[6]Inaturalist was a resource, but provided no concrete answer
[7][A big thanks to the various members of the Slime Mold Collective, NYMS and /r/mycology and /r/slimemolds for their input. The cumulative comments helped provide a modicum of direction where I had none originally.
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