Slime mold Turn over a rotting log in a forest
and you might see a fungus-like blob coating a patch of the decomposing wood.
Return the next day and it might have vanished. Where did it go? Nowhere. It is
Dictyostelium discoideum, the slime
mold. For most of its life, the slime mold exists as thousands of single-celled
organisms, invisible to the naked eye as they dine on decaying leaves and wood.
But when weather conditions become less than ideal, those cells band together,
forming a single entity—"they" become an "it."
If you used time-lapse photography, you could
actually see the macroorganism crawl along, slow as a starfish.
