The myxomycetes are a strange and interesting group, apparently half plant and half animal. We see them as small dry fruiting bodies of various forms, from small puff-ball-like objects, on wood, to brightly colored little stalked balls or cylinders on stalks, less than 10mm tall.
They are so strange and they are now classified in a totally different Kingdom, the Protozoa, neither fungi nor animals. They continue to be treated as ‘honorary fungi’ for the purposes of recording. They develop from spores into primitive animal forms, amoeba-like and swimming about in the water in their substrates, eating bacteria. They then change their form by coming together in huge numbers to form a sort of slime, which still feeds by engulfing food as it moves around, flowing slowly like a large Amoeba.
The organism finally decides that it should reproduce, and the slime emerges from within the deadwood, or whatever substrate it was growing in, and climbs up to a dry spot where the final transformation takes place. It slowly changes into the fruiting body we see, containing thousands on more of dry spores borne on minute threads which expand and contract, contorting, and releasing the spores to the air.
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