What is this disgusting stuff I saw today? The whole area of the stuff is about 2.5 inches long. There are tonnes of different varieties of slugs all over the forest floor (including huge banana slugs). Could it be slug eggs? There are also snails, newts, frogs and salamanders. It is on a damp log. Could it be some sort of fungus?
It’s a bit gross, whatever it is. Especially the wormy strands at the base of the mass.
That looks like a slime mold to me. They’re actually closer to amoeba than fungi, but they’re plenty gross either way.
This slime mold here looks a lot like the one you found. It’s known as the tapioca slime mold for obvious reasons. Apparently it comes out on bark after it rains, which seems to match the image you linked.
I’ll never be able to look at tapioca pudding the same way again.
Slime mold. And I just learned something - I always thought slime mold was a type of fungus, but it closer to an amoeba.
Ewwwww! That’s way grosser than slug eggs or fungus but, yeah, that’s it - blergh!!