Friday Pic #9: Slime Mold
Slime molds are weird things. Originally thought to be a group of fungi, they’re now considered to be paraphyletic - that is, not a natural group of related species. And they’re not fungi, either. Also, I can’t quite tell if they’re supposed to be unicellular or multicellular organisms, as they begin their life cycle as amoebas that eventually aggregate, as food grows scarce, to collectively form fruiting bodies. Earlier this year it was reported that slime molds can learn to navigate labyrinths. What this says about intelligence and consciousness remains to be seen.
The specimen/s below I discovered on a mushroom-hunt near my parents’ place. I suppose it’s feeding on the rotten wood.
The more you study biology, the more you realise that all of these classifications we invent are purely for our own convenience. Nature doesn’t care if we would like to divide it into unicellular and multicellular, or about what definition of “species” we want to use. There’s always something out there that defies explanation until we’ve restructured our thoughts and language. Slime molds are one such example.