{"id":635,"date":"2006-08-25T07:47:33","date_gmt":"2006-08-25T12:47:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/?p=635"},"modified":"2020-01-03T10:55:04","modified_gmt":"2020-01-03T15:55:04","slug":"slime-mold-isnt-mold-after-all","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/slime-mold-isnt-mold-after-all\/","title":{"rendered":"Slime mold isn’t mold after all?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Slime mold<\/a> is one of those things you encounter when you wander around in the woods, like moss and lichens.<\/p>\n

I always thought it was a fungus.<\/p>\n

But now I read this article by Chet Raymo<\/a>, [UPDATE: original story now disappeared, sorry] and it turns out that slime mold isn’t a fungus, but . . . well, something else entirely.<\/p>\n

For part of its life cycle it lives as “free-roaming amoebas, single-celled organisms, grazing on bacteria” — during this stage it’s invisible to the naked eye.<\/p>\n

If the supply of bacteria runs out, however, some of the organisms “secrete a chemical called acrasin, after Acrasia, the cruel witch in Spenser’s Faerie Queen who attracted men and turned them into beasts. It is a call. A signal.” This caused the organisms to clump into the slime form — at which point the mass is able to move by sliding, say, down a log — and then, when it reaches a suitable spot, organisms within the mass organize to form fruiting bodies.<\/p>\n

Raymo gives details of this process in a very readable way, so click through if you enjoy that sort of thing. Incredible stuff.<\/p>\n

Raymo then writes that it’s “now widely agreed”<\/p>\n

that slime molds are neither plant nor animal nor fungus but members of the kingdom Protoctista, which encompasses some of the most ancient single-celled organisms . . . in their curious life cycle slime molds recapitulate that episode in the history of life, which occurred about 700 million years ago, when single-celled microorganisms, having lived on their own for 3 billion years, came together to form multicellular organisms. Invisible life became gloriously visible, and wonderfully diverse. Creatures individually smaller than the point of a pin piled themselves together to become, in the fullness of time, brontosauruses and blue whales.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Something to muse upon the next time you see a splotch of “dog vomit fungus<\/a>” in your perennial bed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Slime mold is one of those things you encounter when you wander around in the woods, like moss and lichens. I always thought it was a fungus. But now I read this article by Chet Raymo, [UPDATE: original story now … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[1487,1486,1485,1488,1484],"class_list":["post-635","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nature","tag-acrasin","tag-chet-raymo","tag-dog-vomit-fungus","tag-protoctista","tag-slime-mold"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/635","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=635"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/635\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6051,"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/635\/revisions\/6051"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=635"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=635"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=635"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}