How is slime mold dependent on other organisms

Nor is it an animal, nor is it a plant, nor is it a fungus. Yet, it has some remarkable capabilities that both help it survive and make it particularly interesting to researchers. Slime mold is a single-celled organism that lacks a brain; more specifically, it is a soil-dwelling amoeba.

It usually contains multiple nuclei in each organism. These organisms can come in almost any color except for green since they lack chlorophyll. When combined, they form strange, entrancing shapes. Researchers have found them in honeycomb arrangements, in clusters like blackberries, while others look like a pile of dog vomit.

Some slime mold remains microscopic while some grows out-of-control, forming masses as large as 10 to 13 feet in size. This wide, seemingly unpredictable, range of appearances leads many people to confuse slime mold for some other type of organism or fungus.

They form strange and sophisticated shapes — some resemble honeycomb lattices, others blackberries. Some remain microscopic, and others grow rogue, forming bulbous masses, as long as 10 to 13 feet. Yet humans largely ignore them. Still, our world is crawling with them. Stephenson and his team — the Eumycetozoan Research Project at University of Arkansas — spent years trying to catalog all species of slime mold around the globe from the Arctic Circle to the tip of Chile.

Slime molds are particularly fond of forest floors where they break down rotting vegetation, feeding on bacteria, yeast, and fungus. When all is well, the slime mold thrives as a single-celled organism, but when food is scarce, it combines forces with its brethren, and grows. Then, once the mass is formed, the cells reconfigure, changing their shape and function to form stalks, which produce bulbs called fruiting bodies. The fruiting bodies contain millions of spores, which get picked up and transported by the wind, a passing insect or an animal.

There, they start the process again as single-celled organisms. These references are in PubMed. This may not be the complete list of references from this article.

National Center for Biotechnology Information , U. Journal List Biophys J v. Biophys J. McGrath and R. Compared to other single-celled organisms, slime molds barely have membranes at all, Latty says. So if you cut one into two bits and put them near each other, they just flow together again. So can you kill a slime mold? In her research, Latty found that slime molds will move toward a substance like sugar and will also move away from substances like salt.

But was this just a response to stimuli, or something else? Answering this question proved complicated. To learn more about slime mold nutrition, Latty helped her colleague Audrey Dussutour presented Physarum with 35 recipes made of different ratios of the elements it needs to survive, protein and sugar, creating a kind of slime mold creme brulee. They found that slime molds will avoid food sources that will harm them and prioritize food that will help them. And not only that, but slime molds can also stretch out tendrils to feed on more than one food source at a time—and do so in the right ratio, so that they receive optimum nutrition.

Then she and her colleagues changed up the choices—in some cases having the slime mold choose between very similar foods in light and dark, and in others creating more contrast. Another study that Latty helped her colleague Chris Reid complete found that, in searching for food, slime molds rarely retrace their steps.

The answer was written in slime—like the stuff that slugs leave behind. And that has big implications for lots of small organisms.