Young  Trichia sporangia

Arcyria obvelata

Welcome to Myxomagic.

I’d like to share some of the wildlife I discover as I explore the area around my home, in particular the magical Myxomycetes, or slime moulds, but also fungi and anything else of interest.

Young Cribraria sporangia

Crawling through the soil almost always unnoticed unless actively sought out, are strange organisms that do not fit into the neat and tidy classifications of plants, animals, or even fungi. Unlike plants, they do not contain chlorophyll, and so cannot make their own food, they have no cell walls to protect them, and they do not need light to grow. Unlike fungi, they do not produce a mycelium, and can not break down complex plant substances like cellulose and lignin. Like an amoeba, they can engulf food particles such as bacteria and other nutrients, but unlike animals, for most of the time they are neither unicellular nor multicellular, but plasmodia. They exist as larger or smaller blobs of protoplasm bounded by a cell membrane, but of indefinite size and containing many, many nuclei (plant and animal cells normally contain only one nucleus per cell, and fungi normally no more than two).

Plasmodia can be brightly coloured on occasion, and large enough to be visible to the unaided eye, when the reason for the term “slime” becomes apparent. Do not let this be a deterrent, however, much less such derogatory colloquial names as “dog’s vomit”, which do little to encourage the casual observer to enter their world of endless beauty and - yes - magic, Myxomagic!

Badhamia foliicola

Signs of Spring.  

Primroses are everywhere and wood anemones brighten the woods and roadsides. Ladies’ Smock, a plant of marshy ground in the East, is common on roadsides here in the West, and it is already brightening the hedgerows. Although called the “Cuckoo Flower”, I haven’t yet had the luck to hear a cuckoo this year. 

Blakeney is almost like an outlier of the Golden Triangle and true wild Daffodils abound along the stream-side and in several pastures that have not yet suffered the abuse of intensive agriculture.

If you look carefully, you may be lucky enough to find the little ‘volcanos’ which betray the nests of mining bees, or even see a solitary bee building and provisioning its nest in a snail shell, which it hides under a wigwam of tiny sticks, and if you venture out after dark in midsummer, you may even see the unworldly lantern-light of the female glow-worm (which is not a worm at all but a wingless beetle).

 Frogspawn

It’s several years now since we last had frogs in the garden pond.The evening croaking of the frogs as they mated in the garden pond was more of a gentle rumbling that you had to listen out for, than the raucous noise that TV cartoons would have us believe in. Within a few days of the appearance of the first male, it was all over, and the shallower areas were overbrimming with fresh clumps of jelly spawn; but the frogs stayed in the pond and could be seen diving for cover as we approach. Magpies used to discovered the spawn, and we were  forced to cover the pond with netting or risk losing all the new generation of tadpoles.

Spring fungi - mostly ascomycetes - are also appearing, but many of them are small and shy, and take some finding, as did the  Gyromitra esculenta pictured below, and the Cedar Cup, Geopora sumneriana. Only the scarlet  Sarcoscypha austriaca stands out at a distance.

  Frog

Still available

The Myxomycetes of the Forest of Dean

Listing 149 species and subspecies, and including 17 distribution maps and 75 illustrations in colour, this unique book also includes a brief history of the recording of slime moulds, notes on their biology and help with identification.

Available from https://glosnats.org/publications/

Price £6.50 inc p&p