A few years ago Snopes addressed a Facebook viral “warning” about supposed “tick nests.” the accompanying photo showed a black glob of goo that looked like caviar, or maybe blackberry jam. Snopes thought it might be regurgitated amphibian ovaries.
I like Snopes but on this one, they’re totally off the mark. The reason I know this is because whatever this shit is it has shown up in the playground of the daycare my wife works at: huge (like, dinner plate sized) gobs of this crap in the playground, and it appears to be spreading. The playground is covered in wood chips, so whatever it is likes wet wood. My wife tried using a shovel to scoop some into a trash can but couldn’t, she said the smell was overpowering. It had an earthy, fungal / mildew smell to it. The center director advised staff to go out and douse it with bleach water after the center closes for the day.
My Google-Fu is failing me. So, what is this stuff?
Because I’ve seen frog eggs and they don’t look like this. Frog eggs are almost clear with a small black speck inside. Also, they’re always laid in water as far as I know. Certainly not laid by the cubic foot in playground wood chips. If, as snopes suggest, it was some internal organs that had been upchucked by some predator I suspect there would a pile of dead frog bits, not just the eggs (or ovaries, as Snopes suggests). Additionally, frogs aren’t particularly numerous around here. These piles are huge. I’ll have my wife take pics and I’ll try to post them later.
Im on my phone so hopefully I did this right. These are pics of some smaller clusters. My wife said that when they poured bleach water on them they emitted something akin to smoke: some fine particulate matter that became airborne. Additionally, underneath the black the stuff is brown.
If it’s in the woodchips, it’s probably some sort of mold or fungus. Black wood fungus, shotgun fungus, etc. Does it look like it was dropped on top of the mulch, or like it grew from underneath?
It could be the mould, but the moment I saw the Snopes photo, my first though was deer scat.
The exact appearance depends on the species, the diet, and the current health of the beast.
Slime molds make spores too, though they’re not fungi. My guess would also be a slime mold, as they feed on decomposing organic matter like wood chips. And they can move.
Slime molds are such strange organisms. They’re not plants, they’re not animals, they’re not fungi, they’re not bacteria… So what the heck are they? They’re basically giant amoebae.
Given that this is a daycare, it sounds like there’s the potential for an educational experience here. Scoop some up (together with the woodchips it’s growing on), put it in an aquarium, and wait to see what it does.
That was actually my suggestion once we (thanks to all here that helped) figured out what it was. However, the director is in “nuke it from orbit” mode, so no dice.
