This week in the woods, we encountered what looked like a patch of miniature Christmas wreaths on the forest floor. Thanks to identification help from the Upper Valley Land Trust’s Jason Berard, we now know it’s Ontario rhodobryum moss, Rhodobryum ontariense, which is also called rose moss. This evergreen moss becomes more conspicuous in wet weather, because its leaves flatten outward and create the rosette (or wreath) forms you see in the photo. We found it growing in an area that’s teeming with maidenhair ferns, which makes sense, as both plants thrive in calcium rich soil.
Continuing with the moss theme, Jason supplied a second photo from this past weekend, which shows a Plagiomnium (tooth moss) species, most likely P. cuspidatum, baby tooth moss. Fun moss facts: these ancient plants are small because they lack vascular structures to transport water, which appear in later-evolved plant types. Their spongy surfaces offer important habitat for amphibians and other moisture-loving creatures, and they’re also a favored nest-building material for many birds.
During weekend woods walks, we also encountered several clusters of wolf’s milk slime mold – also known as toothpaste slime. Why anyone would look at these circular blobs and think, “This reminds me of wolf lactation,” we have no idea. But the toothpaste name makes sense; if you squish a relatively new one of these blobs (which in an early stage, may be Pepto Bismol pink), it will squirt out pink paste. The wolf’s milk slime in this photo is late in its development stage. By this point, it has changed to a dull brownish color, and the interior (spore containing) paste has dried out into a powder form.
We’ve written about these and other plasmodial slime molds previously; they are easy to mistake for fungi, but in fact are a separate – weirder – kind of life form that starts out as an amoeba and then fuses with other amoebas to create a shared life form, a plasmodia, which in turns creates the blobs you see in the photo. Also in the photo: the fruiting bodies of green stain fungus, which we’ve described recently in this blog.
What have you noticed in the woods this week? Submit a recent photo for possible inclusion in our monthly online Reader Photo Gallery.