A few days ago I took my first-ever photo of a slime mold. SO EXCITING!
This little brown clump, less than an inch across, was growing out of the end of a fallen log. (Honestly I’m not sure how I even noticed it.) Specifically this is a slime mold in the genus Stemonitis, I believe.
Why am I so excited about something that’s tiny, brown, and has such a disgusting name? Because slime molds have some of the most fascinating life cycles of any organisms, essentially flipping back and forth between being single-celled organisms and multi-celled organisms. (At one point they were classified with the fungi, but they’re really their own thing.) They start life as single-celled, amoeba-like creatures, but later a bunch of these individual cells will all band together into a blob called a plasmodium that crawls around in search of food. Eventually the blob produces fruiting bodies, which is what you’re seeing in my picture – when I touched them my fingertips came away coated in a soft brown dust of spores. The spores made by the fruiting bodies will develop into a new generation of amoeba-things.
What’s really crazy is that, despite lacking a brain or even a nervous system of any kind, plasmodia show a sort of basic intelligence. They can learn from and anticipate events; they can make decisions. Some are really beautifully bizarre-looking, too, as you can see in the photo gallery at this io9 article.
So in conclusion, yes, I get excited about weird things sometimes. But c’mon. SLIME MOLD.
Many years ago I lived in extreme northwest California. Winter brings endless rain. One winter, I awoke to discover an entire wall of my bedroom had been populated by slime mold overnight!
Hm. As much as I like them I’m not sure I’d want to find them growing out of my bedroom wall.
They are meant to be. Slime mold so full of natural intelligence and I find a kind of alien beauty which really makes you pause. Gary H Lincoff calls them the Dr Jekylls and Mr Hydes of the plant world in his poplar 1980s N A S Field guide to Mushrooms. Lovely photo by the way.
Neat! Slime molds are wonderful. Great to watch them form fruiting bodies. Great catch!
This is my favorite slime mold, chocolate tube slime! It’s the stuff that got me interested in them in the first place.
Chocolate tube slime??? Is that really its common name? That’s amazing.
Yep! https://www.messiah.edu/Oakes/fungi_on_wood/club%20and%20coral/species%20pages/Stemonitis.htm
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