The slime mold named Yellow-fuzz Cone Slime
According to the weather forecast, the rainy season would get fully underway this afternoon at last, so this morning I went to the usual woods to look for slime molds before rainfall.
I happened to find a farmer who produces shiitake mushrooms by log cultivation in this woods that are abundant with nature. He was starting to stand the oak logs diagonally. These oak logs were already embeded with shiitake fungi.
For your reference, these are the oak logs for cultivating shiitake mushroom that the farmer arranged in the woods. White small circles on the logs are the spots where shiitake fungi are embeded.
As a matter of fact, the decayed oak logs that are useless for mushroom cultivation are the best environment for slime molds. Previously, I got some discarded logs from someone who cultivated shiitake at home. However, I felt hesitated to request him the same things again, so I have been looking for other obtaining sources. I thought this was a good chance to get a decayed log. So, I asked the farmer if I could get some old decayed logs that could no longer produce shiitake mushrooms. If I get it, I think I can expect to observe slime molds growing on it before too long. But he didn't seem to understand the purpose of the use of this decayed log. I thought maybe he didn’t know what the slime mold was.
So, I checked some decayed logs in the piled discarded ones in the woods, and fortunately I could discover fruiting bodies of some slime molds occurred on the decayed logs.
I showed it to him and said, "This is the slime molds that I'm interested in," so he finally understood my strange request.
This is the slime mold that I found there, Hemitrichia calyculata (=Hemitrichia clavata var. calyculata) and it's English name is Yellow-fuzz Cone Slime named after its shape. We call it 'Hosoe no nukahokori' in Japan.
You can get an idea of its size by comparing it with the scale (in mm) on the ruler.
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