Yellow-fuzz Cone Slime Plasmodium Forming Fruiting Bodies
Yellow-fuzz Cone Slime (Hemitrichia clavata) is a slime mold that is found in clusters on rotting wood. Neither a plant nor an animal, slime molds are known for the dramatic transformations they go through from the time they first appear to their disintegration. Slime molds are slimy and mold-like when they first emerge, but they soon change color, shape and texture as they develop.
Yellow-fuzz Cone Slime was named for its reproductive stage. When its gelatinous plasmodium starts fruiting, it forms tiny, round, shiny spore-bearing sporangia that can be orange to yellow in color. When the spores are mature, the top of these sporangia open up, creating goblet-shaped cups filled with yellowish, fuzzy threads interspersed with pale yellow spores. (These threads are thought to be involved in the dispersal of the spores.) The stages of Yellow-fuzz Cone Slime are so different that you might well not recognize that they are the same species.
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