What is a slime mold?
Slug and Lamproderma – Photograph by Randy G. Darrah (©Randy Darrah) Scientists once thought slime molds were fungi (singular: fungus) since they reproduce by spores and often produce fruiting bodies that resemble small mushrooms. But slime molds also have a stage where they can move around, making them more like an animal, and some types spend most of their existence as single-celled organisms like amoebae. A 19th century mycologist first suggested “mycetozoan” (which is derived from the Greek words for “fungus” and “animal”) as an appropriate name for slime molds. Taxonomists today refer to slime molds as eumycetozoans. There are three different types of eumycetozoans-myxomycetes, or “true slime molds”; dictyostelids, or “cellular slime molds” and protostelids. The last two types are only visible through a microscope. All three types of slime molds are unicellular for part of their life cycle. Slime Mold Feeding Stages All slime molds typically have at least two life stages: one for
A slime mold may sound like a disease or an infection, but it’s actually a very odd plant. It’s so odd, in fact, that scientists once thought the slime mold was an animal. Because, like an animal, a slime mold can crawl! A slime mold begins its life as a group of small cells that look like microscopic animals, moving about by wh
From the introduction to Steven Johnson’s 2001 book, Emergence: If you’re reading these words during the summer in a suburban or rural part of the world, chances are somewhere near you a slime mold is growing. Walk through a normally cool, damp section of a forest on a dry and sunny day, or sift through the bark mulch that lies on a garden floor, and you may find a grotesque substance coating a few inches of rotting wood. On first inspection, the reddish orange mass suggests that the neighbor’s dog has eaten something disagreeable, but if you observe the slime mold over several days — or, even better, capture it with time-lapse photography — you’ll discover that it moves, ever so slowly, across the soil. If the weather conditions grow wetter and cooler, you may return to the same spot and find the creature has disappeared altogether. Has it wandered off to some other part of the forest? Or somehow vanished into thin air, like a puddle of water evaporating? Slime molds are really groups
