2023-11-30 11:08:00
The day before yesterday I announced the end of the mushroom season. This honey fungus confirms that ending. At least the fungus has exchanged its best days for a declining old age. The life cycle of mushrooms is fast; They do not remain beautiful for more than a week and sometimes they wither away following three days.
Dehydration, freezing and eating are three damaging conditions for mushrooms. At least, for the visible parts: the cap and the stem. The fungus proliferates underground without a care in the world. Or rather: in rotting wood. Honey mushrooms live on dead and dying wood. If a honey fungus grows from a tree, then that tree is beyond help.
The fungus in the photo grows in the grass. But most likely it ‘roots’ in a dead branch or tree root hidden under the grass. The melancholy cousin of the honey fungus, the gloomy honey fungus, especially often does this. By the way, I’m not sure if this is a honey fungus. He’s too far gone for reliable identification.
That doesn’t matter to that young road slug. Although, I don’t know if the snail cares at all. Shehe (snails are both man and woman) might prefer to eat a fresh honey fungus. He hasn’t gnawed yet; otherwise traces would be visible. Mushrooms are often eaten by (forest) mice and snails. In the first case, bites were taken from the brim, in the second case, strips were scraped off over the hat.
This young nudibranch shows a secretion of mucus. A drop beads on the bottom. Mucus is not secreted there, but at the bottom of the snail, which is not called the belly but the foot. The mucus that a walking snail produces there forms a slippery bed to slide on. It would not be efficient to leave the slide following one pass, so the snail collects the passed mucus to eat it.
Three times a week, biologist Koos Dijksterhuis writes regarding something that grows or blooms. Read his previous Nature Diaries here.
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#snail #fungus #eats #slime
