Red raspberry slime mold. What a marvellous name—delicious and repulsive at the same time!
It is found on decaying wood.
Identification: In its prime, raspberry slime mold attracts attention
with its brilliant color, but at other stages it appears pink, purplish, brownish, or gray. It appears as irregular, pillowy
blotches called aethalia, up to 6″ (15 cm) around. Close inspection reveals small rounded bumps on the surface, each about 1/32″ (0.5 mm)
around, the individual plasmodia. The bumps resemble those on a raspberry. Inside the mass, each plasmodium
is shaped like a little cigar. The fruiting bodies appear from June to November.
7/23/2017 · Pine Grove Furnace State Park, Pennsylvania · ≈ 6 × 4″ (14 × 10 cm)
WARNING
Roughly 75 people in North America are poisoned each year by mushrooms, often from eating a poisonous species that resembles an edible species. Though deaths are rare, there is no cure short of a liver transplant for severe poisoning. Don't eat any mushroom unless you are absolutely certain of its identity! Please don't trust the identifications on this site. We aren't mushroom experts and we haven't focused on safely identifying edible species.
Tubifera ferruginosa description by Thomas H. Kent, last updated 11 Jul 2023.