English: Stalked slime mould fruiting bodies This stalked form is the most common type of spore-bearing structure among slime moulds. There would originally have been a single slime mould, in the form of a plasmodium (a slow-moving gelatinous mass of protoplasm), on or within this piece of wood; on fruiting, it divided up into many small units, each of which developed into one of these stalked sporangia (the plural of sporangium, the name for an individual spore-bearing structure); the spores develop in the upper part. In the species shown here, each of the sporangia was 2-3mm tall. At this stage, where the sporangia are still developing, and are gelatinous in consistency, very many species look greatly alike. Identification to species is only possible when the sporangia are mature, at which time they are no longer gelatinous, and they may be quite different in colour; they would, by then, have developed distinctive internal features that would allow the species to be identified after careful microscopic examination.