Star jelly

It’s funny how it happens sometimes, you spend your whole life unaware of something and then as soon as you find out about it, you spot it in the ‘real’ world. Star jelly, a white, gelatinous substance, is one such thing.

I’d never, ever heard of it until about a month ago when I came across an Instagram post and then promptly found some in a puddle a few days later.

Now if you look it up, it has an interesting folklore and nearly all the names for it include the word ‘star’. My favourites are star-slime, star-snot, star-slubber, star-spurt, and star-slutch! 

Some say that star jelly falls to earth during meteor showers, others that it’s the fruiting body of slime molds or algae. I think the bit that I found when out walking with my son in our local bog (how cool is it that we have a local bog?!?) conforms to the idea that it comes from frogs. The theory is that it’s unfertilised spawn jelly that comes out of the frog when something eats it, which then swells on contact with the water.

This makes sense as we also found this:

I’ve never seen so much frogspawn! It was on the edge of an overspilled ditch that was rapidly receeding as the water drained so we gently coaxed the frogspawn into deeper water. There was easily 20 kilos of the stuff!

I must head back there to see if there are any tadpoles now. With that amount of spawn you’d hope that a few would make it!

Have you ever come across star jelly? Have you seen any frogspawn this year? Let me know in the comments below!