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I recently went walking in the highlands in Snowdonia, Wales and we came across this:

enter image description here

Can anyone explain what it is? My guess was some kind of fungus but I'm not positive. The ground was very water logged and boggy.

It looked a lot like frog spawn, but it's autumn here and we wouldn't see frog spawn until Spring. There appeared to be no animals living inside or around it.

It's often called star jelly and there's a whole wikipedia article on Star Jelly talking about it:

“Star jelly” (also called astromyxin, astral jelly, pwdr sêr, star rot, or star shot) is a gelatinous substance sometimes found on grass or even on branches of trees.1 According to folklore, it is deposited on the earth during meteor showers. Star jelly is described as a translucent or grayish-white gelatin that tends to evaporate shortly after having “fallen.” Explanations have ranged from the material's being the remains of frogs, toads, or worms, to the byproducts of cyanobacteria, to the paranormal.[2][3][4][5] Reports of the substance date back to the 14th century and have continued to the present day.

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  • $\begingroup$ How did it feel on touching??? $\endgroup$
    – souvik bhattacharya
    Commented Nov 11, 2014 at 4:19
  • $\begingroup$ Surprisingly solid. when I poked it, rather than my hand going into it, a lump fell off. $\endgroup$
    – user9894
    Commented Nov 11, 2014 at 9:13
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    $\begingroup$ It could be a fungal formation. If you look carefully there's one mushroom just left bottom of it and it also looks kinda soggy, for lack of a better word. So if there was a lot of moisture, too much of it for a bunch of mushrooms that often grow together out of same hypha, they could decompose into a jelly-like see-through substance as the cellulose soaks in water. Digestive enzymes that snails and slugs (gastropods) release when feeding off them might have also helped with that process. I've seen similar before, it's not limited to Welsh highlands. $\endgroup$
    – TildalWave
    Commented Nov 11, 2014 at 15:41
  • $\begingroup$ Could be algal secretion, fungal growth, bacterial formation, animal's secretion, etc many thing. $\endgroup$
    – user25568
    Commented Aug 29, 2016 at 9:30
  • $\begingroup$ There appear to be no animals? Insects are also animals, in the boggy environment insects could live. $\endgroup$
    – user25568
    Commented Aug 29, 2016 at 9:33

1 Answer 1

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So the One show did a magazine piece on this the other day; a scientist did some DNA analysis of some of it.

The conclusion was that it's frog jelly (full of frog DNA). Apparently frogs have glands full of the components of the jelly in sacks in their bodies, when the sacks come into contact with moisture it expands massively (same process that allow them to produce frog spawn). When a frog is eaten (by a bird or fox) the jelly expands on contact with any moisture. The animal eating the frog either vomits it up or doesn't eat it in the first place and voila.

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  • $\begingroup$ Why did you cross out a whole section? If it is not correct, please remove it. Otherwise leave it, as it was. $\endgroup$
    – Chris ♦
    Commented Feb 10, 2015 at 11:12
  • $\begingroup$ Do all frogs make this jelly or just some? i.e Can we narrow down what species this came from? $\endgroup$
    – James
    Commented Feb 10, 2015 at 17:48
  • $\begingroup$ All frogs. It's the jelly they produce to make frog spawn, so I'd guess only females. They definitely had the DNA of the frog, so you could likely discover the frog species from that. They also said that the DNA in places had been contaminated with predator DNA, hence the conclusion that the frog had been eaten. $\endgroup$
    – user9894
    Commented Feb 11, 2015 at 9:41

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