SPORANGIA: total height 1 to 1.5 mm., scattered or gregarious, globose, stalked, erect, 0.3 to 0.5 mm. diam., usually brownish, reddish, or bronze, sometimes steel-blue, iridescent.
PERIDIUM: delicately membranous, colorless, falling away in large fragments.
STALK: setaceous, black, shining, rising from a purple-brown, circular hypothallus.
COLUMELLA: cylindrical, truncate, scarcely reaching to half the height of the sporangium.
CAPILLITIUM: of rigid threads, radiating from the apex of the columella, dichotomously branching and anastomosing, black or purple-brown, pale at the base, colored to the free extremities; the threads often connecting the apex of the columella with the somewhat persistent base of the sporangial wall are usually slender and colorless.
SPORES: Violet-gray, minutely warted, 6.5 - 8 µm diam.
PLASMODIUM: Watery white
HABITAT: On dead leaves.
NOTE: This is one very small slime mould only 1 mm high and 0.4 mm in dia. Not the easiest thing to find on leaf litter in a forest!
SPORANGIA: Total height 5 to 20 mm. Sporangia cylindrical, obtuse, stalked, brownish purple or almost black, usually in large clusters, sometimes scattered.
PERIDIUM: membranous, persistent, purplish in the lower part, occasionally mottled with darker shades.
STALK: black, shining, 1 to 4 mm. high, rising from a brown, membranous hypothallus.
COLUMELLA: reaching nearly to the top of the sporangium.
CAPILLITIUM: of dark brown threads springing from all parts of the columella, combined into a loose network, the ultimate branches forming a delicate smooth or spinose surface-net with angular, unequal meshes, varying from 6-16 µm wide.
SPORES: grayish violet or brownish violet, 6-8 µm in diameter, faintly or strongly spinulose, the spines arranged in a more or less reticulate pattern.
PLASMODIUM: White
HABITAT: On dead wood.
SPORANGIA: Sporangia clustered, in scattered tufts, cylindric, obtuse, stipitate or sometimes nearly sessile, natural brown or army-brown fading to avellaneous.
STALK: short, 3-7 mm. tall; stipe fuscous or jet-black, only slightly expanded below.
HYPOTHALLUS: scanty or none.
COLUMELLA: lessening upward, sometimes attaining the apex of the sporangium, sometimes dissolved in capillitial threads some distance below.
CAPILLITIUM: Of rich brown threads forming the usual inner network of medium density, with many wide expanded nodes, the surface net made up of delicate, almost colourless threads surrounding small polygonal meshes.
SPORES: spore-mass ferruginous; by transmitted light very pale, brownish, minutely warted, 7-9 µm.
PLASMODIUM: white to pale yellow.
HABITAT: On living leaves, sometimes also on rotten wood or debris
DISTRIBUTION: Cosmopolitan, known from Auckland and only.
