The organism that we can encounter in forests, especially after rainfall, is a slime mould. In the photographs, we present two specimens that we managed to find in a forest near Bolesławiec. They are so-called foam blooms.
They possess some characteristics of plants, fungi and animals, although they are none of these. They range in size from several to a dozen or so centimetres. Interestingly, they can move (at a speed of up to half a centimetre per hour), for example in search of food. The intense yellow colour of the specimens shown in the photographs indicates that we are dealing with a slime mould commonly known as “Witch’s Butter”.
As we read in Wikipedia:
Slime moulds are heterotrophic organisms. They feed on bacteria, fungi (sometimes consuming entire fungal fruiting bodies) and protozoa. Their vegetative stage consists of a multinucleate plasmodium that crawls using pseudopodia. The plasmodium moves in a coordinated manner and responds to stimuli—it exhibits chemotaxis, phototaxis and thermotaxis. When it encounters food, such as bacterial colonies, it directs the flow of plasma there and stops until the nutrients have been depleted.
Slime moulds – Foam bloom