Rebirtha said:

The slime mold collective sounds like an interesting place haha. I thought this picture looked similar. It's Physarum polycephalum.

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yeah its a pretty cool place. First heard about it on a ted talk. Not much activity compared to here though.

That looks pretty much identical its just the formation of the spores that looks different. That one is straightup clumping whereas the one I saw mostly on formed along straight lines

Maybe mine was just fruiting in a weird spot so its looks different

thanks so much for the reply!

Lost Geometer B said:

He's  not super visible right now. I think it was cleaning up after the last flush, and enjoying the water I was spraying. If I can find a good camera for close ups I'll see if I can make him pose.

The original substrate in that tub was bark/wood mulch from my university, which slime molds liked a lot. I think some spores made it through pasteurization.

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ha, wow. something really cool happened in your bin, I hope you fully appreciate how cool that is.

I've read that slime mold feed mainly on bacteria, so perhaps that would be considered a beneficial survivor of pasteurization. What I'm curious about now is if you pasteurized properly or not. It would be cool if slime mold could survive those temps (which seems unlikely at first blush, but you never know)

If you didn't pasteurize properly, its possible that the slime mold ate the rest of the bad bacteria/spores and saved your project

Either way I've been very interested in having companion organisms involved in mushroom cultivation. This seems like a good candidate. They do like similar (if not identical) environments after all

Mrcloudy said:

That actually sounds like a cool idea, having the slime mold growing in there as maybe a way to help guard against unwanted bacteria.

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