Badhamia utricularis Slime Mould

Some of the “Friends of Middlewick” group were kind enough to give me directions to a large slime mould clump on the underside of an old tree trunk.

A species I hadn’t seen before, with its thousands of intricate fruiting bodies, hanging almost balloon-like when viewed up close.

As per usual with this kind of thing, they weren’t growing in a very “photograph friendly” spot. I was a bit restricted to how close I could get to the fruiting bodies with a flash and diffuser attached to the camera. That wasn’t such an issue as I wanted to capture some slightly wider close-up shots, so as to not lose the overall spectacle of seeing such a vast mass of them.

Once I got much closer, to isolate an individual clump, I used natural light so that the camera had a little more space to move in. When I started reviewing some of the focus stacks in the camera, it quickly became apparent how much these individual fruiting bodies moved around in next to no breeze whatsoever. It took multiple stack attempts before I had one where they kept still, hanging from their fragile tethers.

I also photographed some of the areas of the traveling B. utricularis plasmodia, before developing into the fruiting clumps. In one area it resembled melted cheese on top of a chocolate cake. Probably not a polar opposite taste combination that would take off in the same way that salted caramel did.

I returned just over three weeks later and the fruiting bodies had changed colour and were beginning to break down to release their spores. I was quite surprised to see them there still, as I know a lot of species of slime mould have a very short fruiting cycle with many changing dramatically in just a few short hours.

I didn’t have my macro camera with me this time but given how many hours I spent editing the stacks from when they looked more photogenic, I was more than happy to just take a couple of phone record shots instead.