Hello all. Here's my first post to this forum. I found this while walking along a brook this morning, following a day of heavy rains. My best guess is a polypore, I don't think it's Trametes versicolor although with all that goo I can't be sure. As for the goo, I'd guess a Slime Mold. Well, it's not really all that gooey. Since I'm just joining this forum, I just post this one. I've a few others to ask about at another time. Thanks very much for any thoughts on this. I've been hoping to find a forum such as this for a while and am quite happy to find it.
Thanks for the reply, Rob. That's an interesting suggestion. Would a polypore manifest itself as a mass of material like that without any fruiting bodies or a huge fruiting body? I'm fairly new to fungi, so it never occurred to me that it might be a mushroom. I thought they basically spread by mycelia and just the fruiting bodies projected above the host surface.
Just a quick response, MycoRob can fill in better details here....when you see mushrooms and fungi...it's actually the 'fruit' of the true fungus. The seeds are the spore...the MAIN body? Is what we don't see inside the wood/ground/host....this is often the reason we loose so many trees as we dont' know they're infected till it's WAY too late.
Thanks for adding your response. I do understand what you've written. I've photographed mycelia before and read about the "humongous fungus". But I haven't seen such a huge undefined manifestation of the "fruit" like this before. This spreads up the tree at least 6 feet and covers pretty much the entire side where I was facing. Most polypores I've seen, while sometimes amassing quite a lot of tree or ground real estate, usually have some definition to their shape. So this large amorphous expanse outside the host surprised me. I'll look forward to what Rob has to say. Maybe I'm not expressing myself well here. But to me. this looked like a polypore(the greenish part) being overrun by something else...a fungus or slime mold(the orange stuff).
