Sasquatch Skat

Richard T. Haard, Ph. D.
Plant Propagation Manager
Fourth Corner Nurseries

Here I am recuperating with walks and trying my best not to worry about how I can fill our shrub seed quota, without beating the bushes for seed with the routine I have perfected over the last 20 years. I am not about to write a column this issue on shrubs, but to share with you what I have been enjoying most these days: walking the forest trails near my home.

My wife, Karen, and I always called it Sasquatch Skat, first as a family joke then for my mycology and biology students while I was teaching at Western Washington University. Now, no disrespect meant to the Sasquatch, an elusive being that some claim lives today in remote valleys of interior Alaska and interacts with humans. It does seem to be a mysterious thing, though, with the appearance of this yellow slime that seems to pile up on itself, transforming into a whitecrusted blue-gray mass of powder. Actually, it is a fruiting body of a slime mold, Fulago septica. It is not a fungus but more of an amoeba, a myxogastria, inhabiting moist rotting wood.

Soft rotting wood is a wondrous thing. In the forests, it is substrate and habitat for beneficial fungi that help native plants. In the early days of when we were living at our wooded homesite, our kids would come into the house after dark with green glowing wood torn apart from rotting logs, projecting light bright enough to read into the warm summer evening or to find your way on a moonless night. Well, here was another inhabitant of this wonderful microcosm and a food source for our elusive slime mold living as an amoeba at first, then fusing into a moving naked mass of protoplasm - a plasmodium.

These amoeba and the plasmodia feed by engulfing microorganisms. The plasmodium grows in an amorphous fashion with much cytoplasmic streaming and can even travel. When the food supply wanes, the plasmodium will migrate to the surface of its substrate and transform into rigid fruiting bodies. The fruiting bodies are what are commonly seen in these drying days of August, as the critters come to the surface to reproduce and be distributed to new substrate by splashing raindrops.

When mycologists teach general biology, they bring some really strange things into their laboratory classrooms: including, at least, a plasmodium captured and placed on moist toweling in a covered, transparent container. When fed with bacteria grown from oatmeal flakes occasionally sprinkled, the plasmodium will thrive indefinitely, growing and streaming from place to place in its new home. Quite fascinating to watch.

Slime molds are often beautiful and delicate organisms. Once you know where to look, they can be found from lawns to vegetation at the edge of melting snow in the subalpine, all part of this natural system that gives us native plants forever.