Stemonitis Axifera

 

Day 249: The highlight of Thursday's nine-mile hike was not a grand, sweeping vista, a waterfall, a pristine lake. Those are fine for "destination" hikers to pursue, but I prefer the scenery of a much smaller scale. Since discovering and identifying my first slime mold roughly five years ago, I have been hunting for any species of Stemonitis, carefully examining rotting wood and leaf litter for its distinctive thin-stalked and clustered sporangia. I had found Stemonitopsis (a genus with similar morphological features), but not Stemonitis. Perhaps I was looking in all the wrong places, perhaps my eye simply wasn't tuned to its scale because the genus was reputed to occur relatively commonly. Was I overlooking it? I found that hard to believe, given the amount of time I spend examining the microcosm in which slime molds grow. Earlier in the day, I had found some Ceratiomyxa and was thinking that I should be content with that. However, after nodding to it appeciatively on my return route, I went on a tenth of a mile or so and then stepped off trail again to check another rotten log. "Nothing to see here," I said, but as I turned, a small brown outgrowth caught my eye. "Hang on a mo'...is that Stemonitis? Oh, I've found Stemonitis! Stemonitis! Oh, you little beauties!" Tucked into a crack on the south-facing surface, two groupings of Stemonitis were standing side by side, a third smaller and oldeer group a few inches to their left. The next fifteen minutes were spent angling around with the camera to try to get a clear image, cursing the sunfleck lighting which kept going from deep shadow to bright glare as a breeze moved leaves overhead. A party of hikers passed me by, no doubt curious about what I was photographing but not so inquisitive as to ask. Their destination, after all, had been any or all of the three waterfalls along this same trail, not some piece of rotten wood half-concealed by prickly salmonberry bushes. I doubt they felt a tenth of the excitement at the falls as I was experiencing upon finding a 5 mm diameter brown spot on a deteriorating log. That characteristic...growing on a substrate of rotting wood...as well as its other physical attributes helped me sort out my find as Stemonitis axifera, one of the more common "chocolate tube" slime molds.