There are a few kinds of goo you can find on logs!
Jelly Fungi are a number of different wood eating fungi whose fruiting bodies have a rubbery, jellylike consistency. Like most mushrooms the external growths are just temporary, existing to spread spores, but if they dry out before theyre finished they can remain dormant a very long time! They plump up again and pick up where they left off when the weather gets moist.
They're paraphyletic, meaning that even though they're all similar, jelly fungi are not necessarily related to each other!
Also it should be noted, wood eating fungi didn't appear on earth for a few million years after the first wood, so at one time, trees actually didn't rot. Once they fell over they just stayed there like a rock forever. There were just mountains of eternal dead trees piled up, forming a kind of habitat we can't even imagine.
Then there are slime molds, which I find during the cooler rainier season or even the dead of winter. Not everyone knows what these are, so they are actually amoebas that gather together until they're visible without a microscope. They crawl around, the entire mass able to move a few inches a day, eating other microorganisms, and once they've gained enough mass they fuse together into tiny mushroom-like growths that carry spores.
The remarkable thing about this is that slime "molds" have no relation at all to fungus, and are ALSO paraphyletic, at a higher level than the jelly fungi were. Meaning, the different jelly fungi are still all fungi, but some slime molds might not even be any more related to other slime molds than you are. They don't all share one slime mold ancestor or anything.
A colonial amoeba with a spore stage is evidently just an easy form for life to stumble upon, multiple times independently. Slime molds could, therefore, hypothetically exist exactly like our own slime molds all throughout our universe, so long as other worlds developed anything like cellular life.
Another goo I like to find is nostoc, which resembles lumps of green jelly and grows continuously, ie it doesn't come and go like either fungi or slime molds but forms permanent masses! Unlike either fungi or slime molds, it doesn't eat anything, and instead photosynthesizes just like a plant!
It is however not a plant at all, and in fact maybe a billion years older than the first plants. It's a cyanobacterium, which is often considered a type of "algae," except most kinds of "algae" are protozoa with cells like those of plants and animals, and again, not all related to eachother - a simple photosynthetic cell is just another thing nature has made many, many times.
Bacteria aren't even anything like our cells though. They're simpler and more ancient than that, not merely a different "kingdom" of life like you vs. a plant, but an entire different "domain" of life, so you and a plant have a LOT in common structurally, but neither you nor a plant have really anything at all in common with how bacteria are built.
Cyanobacteria, like these nostoc colonies, would have been the very first life on earth to begin harnessing energy from the sun, and are also thought to be the first life on earth to produce oxygen as waste.
For millioms of years nothing lived on earth but bacterial slime, and then some of it learned to eat sunlight and began pooping oxygen, and this actually caused what we call the "oxygen catastrophe" because it killed off most other life on the planet, the cyanobacteria completely re-engineering earth's atmosphere into the one that allowed all modern life as we know it to exist! Would a different world have evolved otherwise, or would it have stayed a silent world of only brown and grey slime, forever and ever? Oxygen is energizing but it's also "toxic," it's part of why we age and die, so the struggle to keep existing in this usable yet sickening atmosphere seems to be what triggered the still ongoing explosion of more and more diverse life.
I've been using photos off google so far but here's some of the nostoc I've been growing in jars at home:
This is a species I find on wet tree bark or in moss around the columbia gorge, and it forms these sheets of clear gel on smooth surfaces, but on wood it likes to bunch up into globbies:
This piece has been in a very wet glass container on a warm windowsill for around a year; this is the side facing the sun!
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