Today, while walking across the meadows and groves just outside my hometown ...
... in the hope to find something interesting for the Fungi Friday ...
... I came across the trunk of some relatively small tree lying by the path that leads across the sparsely wooded area near the sea.
In some places on that piece of rotting wood, the bark looked like an easily detachable envelope. When I removed a piece of bark ...
... an interesting, fungi-infested habitat was revealed.
I don't know the name of this green mold.
The mold was intensely green for the most part, but some patches and borders were pale, some even white.
In places, the wood was covered with a completely white fungal growth ...
... that from a certain angle, and through the macro lens, looked like a snowy landscape. I found different kinds of white fungal growth. This one is smooth as ice cream.
This one has a different structure.
The long filaments are clearly visible. It looks a bit like cotton candy.
Some fluffy white structures ...
... looked pretty cute when seen through a macro lens.
There was a slug among that fungal fluff.
Soon it started to move ...
... and I followed ...
... with my camera ...
... that epic, slow journey ...
... across the mysterious fungal fields.
These look like some jelly fungi ...
... but only from one side.
They are hairy on the other side and that furry surface doesn't resemble the jelly at all.
I found the Segestria senoculata spider, hidden among those half-jelly fruiting bodies.
There is an abundance of spider silk ...
... all over this mysterious world under the bark.
Following these elegant veils ...
... I found another ...
... considerably bigger spider.
I don't know the name of this species.
There was a woodlouse nearby.
I mean, the empty exoskeleton of a woodlouse.
While photographing this well-camouflaged arachnid ...
... I didn't notice the presence of another spider of the same kind. Only later at home, when I enlarged the pictures on the PC screen, I saw it in a couple of shots.
I didn't expect to find so many cool things under the bark.
Here you can see a minuscule millipede coming out of the layer of soft, rotten wood that looks a lot like soil.
Here the focus is back on the fungi.
Back on the green mold.
This Pisaura mirabilis spider ...
... was resting on the bar. I took a couple of photographs ...
... and then the spider crawled to the place where the bark was recently removed. It looked better on that surface.
Here you can see more silk. Or fungal filaments. Sometimes It's hard to tell.
I had a great time exploring this creepy stuff hidden under the bark. It felt a bit like a Halloween adventure. Hope you'll enjoy it too.
As always in these posts on HIVE, the photographs are my work - THE END.