UFO...Unidentified Fruiting Object?

[beetleman]

I have seen a couple of these in my terrarium the past week, so I got the camera out and took a closer look. They are on wood that stays wet from the sprayings I do for the orchids. I guess the baby snail ate one of them, which are pests in my terrarium. The arrow points at the hairy rim of the unknown object. The snails tend to multiply very rapidly and eat some of the mosses and some of the exposed roots of the orchids. I saw a few adults when I first set up the tank and than I started seeing lots of very small ones. Whenever I see one now, I take it out with a pencil to keep the population down. The snail in the picture is around 1.5mm in diameter. Both pictures are cropped about 40%. The snail was very far into the tank, so the shot is hand held and not that good. The UFO shot is higher up in the tank and I was able to use the tripod and focusing rail to put the camera into the terrarium and get a good shot of the other specimen. I cranked up the zoom to 16x for the first picture, which is into the digital zoom range of the camera but it came out rather nice being on the tripod and using the 2 second timer.

1/5
F5
ISO100


1/6
F3.5
ISO100

[Erland R.N.]

That sure is an UFO to me.
You did a pretty good job photographing these tiny things.

Snails can be a big problem in aquariums too, both salt and freshwater ones.

Erland

[Ken Ramos]

I looked at this a bit earlier...I'm frying hamburgers...and was very surprised. Don't know what it is Doug but that peristome looks pretty mean. Nice shots!

[Walter Piorkowski]

I think that what you have here Doug is an example of a ascomycete or sac fungi. Don't ask which genus.

Walt

[beetleman]

Thank you guys....And thank you Walt for your imput, it gives me a place to start looking. I will keep an eye on it to see if it does anything else (if the snails don`t get to it)

[rjlittlefield]

Nice scale bar, too!

--Rik