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18 hours ago
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A few years ago, I started looking at the underside of logs and it changed my life. I found a secret carnival of the most bodacious and interesting organisms I had ever seen. Bubbles of candy-pink gloss on stilts (Comatricha nigra), bunches of rainbow iridescence on toffee strings (Badhamia utricularis), bouffants of raspberry parfait (Arcyria denudata) – and those are just a few that have appeared on bits of wood in our urban garden.
Slime moulds, or myxomycetes, spend part of their life cycle as what are known as fruiting bodies – which look a bit like tiny mushrooms, hence why they were once classified as fungi (they’re actually in the kingdom Protista). Often you will find them, at this stage, in a colony – or, well, I’d suggest galaxy, sweetshop or funfair would be more accurate for a collective noun.
Their bonkers beauty was the gateway for me. The first time I saw one was an astonishing image by the photographer Barry Webb published in New Scientist. I stared at it for ages because I couldn’t work out what it was or why I’d never heard about something so ridiculously beautiful. It looked like an elongated crimson spog – you know, the bobbly ones in liquorice allsorts no one likes – balanced on the longest eyelashes in the world. Webb had found this Stemonitis in a woodland in southern England. Up the road from me! I was hooked.
It didn’t take long to get my eye in. With a 40x magnification jeweller’s loupe (a 10x one is fine, I’m told), the hidden world opens up. A torch helps too. Fruiting bodies come in all kinds of shapes: berets, cups, cones, eggs, goblets – all around 1mm high or smaller. Look out for flashes of colour – red, orange, yellow, pink – and rainbowy iridescence. Slime moulds live on dead wood, sticks, twigs, leaf litter, dung. They live all over the world, but especially in woodland and forest habitats. Saying that, they are in parks, gardens, on fence posts – anywhere with organic matter.
You never know what you’re going to find: sometimes nothing, especially if it has been dry; sometimes Mr Blobby’s family reunion, or an ice-cream sundae designed by Dalí, or the Crystal Maze dome balanced on a whisker. This makes the life of a slime mould hunter/lover exciting. Their lives are ephemeral, ethereal, quick. A fruiting body can turn from gooey bright custard to crackly iridescence to tufts of silver sporulated shell in a few days, or less.
The other day, a large dollop of bright yellow Fuligo septica, or scrambled egg slime, appeared on a tree stump outside our back door. Soon, it had turned bright red, and then brown. The sudden and stunning nature of this species’ appearance has warranted quite a fruity folk history, too. As Ingvar Svanberg and Sabira Ståhlberg point out, fear and curiosity led slime moulds to be associated with witches and demons. Fuligo septica was known as “troll or witch butter” in Sweden as early as the 16th century. It was thought that the yellow globs were traces of a supernatural thief carrying stolen milk or butter, sent by a witch. But this idea stretches much further back, before the early modern period. In fourth-century China, Fuligo septica was apparently called “demon faeces”.
Most slime moulds are so small and hidden that they live undetected by humans, so have avoided negative attention. In fact, researchers and scientists are increasingly looking to slime moulds to help solve problems. Before they erupt into the pointillistic fruiting bodies, myxomycetes spend most of their existence in a state more characteristic of an animal. Commonly, this is a bright yellow slick that moves around and explores, predating, hunting, scoffing fungal hyphae, algae and spores. Mostly it lives in the moist and dark. The ones I have tracked have been on the underside of logs.
Mysteriously, they are single-celled, with no brain or nervous system, and yet they can solve problems such as mazes; they can decide, anticipate, learn and “teach” younger slime moulds.
You may have read about scientists using slime mould plasmodium to help map dark matter, or optimise transport networks. Nowadays, researchers in a multitude of disciplines – from engineering to town planning, robotics to security – are using slime mould algorithm (SMA) to solve problems. This is because slime moulds are sophisticated spatial decision-makers and use their unique body architecture to explore and select the best option or path out of many alternatives.
Since my recent slime obsession began we have kept a couple of plasmodia at home – Busta Slimes and Albert Einslime – feeding them oats and watching them wander. Under the microscope, seeing the cytoplasm flow rhythmically through the “veins” of the slime felt like a front-row seat for a kind of intelligence that we don’t understand yet.
I think that’s one of the lessons we can learn from slime moulds: quite simply, that there is a lot to learn. That our human perspective isn’t everything. Their incomprehensible “intelligence” can puncture some of our human exceptionalism and hubris. If the most beautiful and exquisite organisms are hidden from human view, perhaps the planet isn’t primarily for us?
On that note, I’m off to hang out with tiny berets of amaretti (Didymium) in the cemetery next door. It’s true that you might get funny looks if you start crouching about in shady undergrowth or staring really intensely at a pile of twigs, but I promise you it’s worth it. Just look up Barry Webb’s photographs; you won’t look back.
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Lucy Jones is the author of Matrescence, Losing Eden and The Nature Seed
