#1850 - Didymium sp. - Didymium Slime Mold
Found among leaf litter up at Jarrahdale, by some of the kids attending a fungi walk.
There’s almost twenty species of Didymium in Australia, but I have no idea how to tell them apart. At least six of them have been found in the Perth metropolitan area alone.
Didymium is one of the acellular or plasmodial slime molds, which start as microscopic individual cells hunting bacteria and other microorganisms, then form slimy amorphous organisms visible with the naked eye once they’ve exhausted their food supply then crawl off to form conspicuously shaped fruiting bodies as here. For single-celled organisms, they can reach immense sizes - the plasmodia in some species can be a meter across and weigh up to 20 kilograms.
Didymium is also a mixture of praseodymium and neodymium, originally mistaken for a discrete chemical element, that is used in lenses to block sodium light and some infrared wavelengths.
