Every summer UNH Cooperative Extension offices across New Hampshire get calls like this from panicked home gardeners: “Ewwww! There’s an orange-yellow slimy blob that’s growing in the bark mulch around our shrubs. Almost overnight it seems to have grown from a small patch of what we thought was dog vomit to a giant thing the size of a bath towel! It’s creepy, like some alien creature. Help!” Don’t blame the landscaper who spread your mulch or the garden supply retailer you bought it from. The blob-like invader is a slime mold, whose biological name is Fuligo septica, one of an unusual class of organisms that sometimes behave like plants, sometimes like animals.