I have kidnapped a slime mold from the woods

 

I am surprised the thing did not die on me.

Current inventory (excepting dormant specimens)

Most of these IDs are (as usual) provisional but almost surely correct. The remainder are undoubtedly correct.

Cryptogams:

Iridescent gametophyte (due to its low-light-tolerance it is basically immune to the cyanobacteria mentioned below)

Noniridescent gametophyte (seems to be slowly dying from cyanobacterial allelopathy)

Asterella californica

Sphaerocarpos

Invertebrates:

That unidentified millipede species I've been posting about (it's visually identical to Cylindrodesmus hirsutus, if I haven't said so here already)

Angiosperms:

Crassula connata (most are dormant seeds, the three that germinated in the summer are growing very slowly due to chronic neglect; admittedly I'm favoritism-ing the Asterella)

Cuscuta californica(?)

Cuscuta subinclusa

Several potatoes and weeds (for feeding dodders)

Sorry, not going to post dodder/Crassula pics here, see previous commentary on marcescent leaves aesthetics crisis (I know dodders have nonexistent or barely visible leaves but I am also suffering from a floral abscission scar aesthetics crisis).

In case I haven't mentioned it subinclusa turns green in low light just like californica(?), and when grown side by side the vegetative parts of the two look noticeably different (subinclusa is thicker on average, able to turn greener, has leaves(?) that are consistently larger, and has little prickles like a cucumber on parts of its stem near the haustoria). I'm going to assume the fleshiness is because subinclusa is a taxon of less arid microhabitats than californica(?), no idea what the prickles do though.

All 4 of the other juveniles molted in sync

 

EDIT 10/10: no longer 100% sure all of them molted simultaneously, counted one recently and it still had same number of segments?

Caught the entire batch molting at the same time! I'm very relieved. In the past few weeks I'd been biting my nails because I was worried they'd be so cowardly that they'd get malnutrition and die half an inch underneath the proverbial milk and honey. Remember how that's seemingly almost what'd been happening with those Nyctoporis grubs?

The adult seems to be significantly less epigean now (but still surfaces near-daily for considerable periods because of its voracious appetite). Whereas it tended to completely surface in the past it now prefers to feed on the undersides of leaves with only its anterior end above ground (tenebrionid larva style). The highly surface-active behavior it displayed previously appears to be initially from inadequate nutrition and then (once I had figured out how to rot leaves properly) from several weeks of intensive compensatory feeding.

I guess this means the ones loose at the Arboretum are, like, somewhat constantly starving. Such is life?