Hey,
Thanks for those pictures! I really have never seen anything quite like it... the sime mould I worked with was of a different order and species than these are. All slime moulds come under the class Mycetozoa. Listed below are the different orders and families.
Protostelia
Protosteliida
Myxogastria
Liceida
Echinosteliida
Trichiida
Stemonitida
Physarida
Dictyostelia
Dictyosteliida
I worked with Dictyostelium, and largely laboratory strains that never formed huge masses that your slime moulds (if I may call them that) do.
I believe that the kind you were looking at belong to the order Myxogastria. They are true slime moulds or plamodial slime moulds where cell membranes are missing. These 'cells' just clump together to form these huge feeding stages called plasmodia (exactly what u saw!) that are quite fascinating. Dictyostelia are cellular slime moulds and form much smaller feeding stages.
Your kind actuallym move at the rate of a mm per hour but can go as fast as 2 cm per minute. They just engulf all kinds of organic matter in their paths.
So, in answer to your question, no, these don't look like what I worked with. Mine required a microscope to be viewed. These are fascinating...you should see if you can look at a bunch under a microscope...see the individual spores perhaps.. or just starve a glob of it and watch the spores form. WOnder what they'll look like then...
