Slime Molds [video] | Hacker News Reader

Slime Molds [video]

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Earlier this year, I found a big yellow blob in my garden with no idea what it was. It disappeared the next day (basically baked in the sun) then reappeared a few days later several yards away. The color in person was really striking! It turns out it is a Jasmine slime mold [0]. It has been creeping around my garden off and on ever since.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuligo_septica

There's a rare ascomycete fungus, Nectrioposis violacea, that parasitises Fuligo septica and turns it from yellow to blue in color. There seem to be various color morphs, one I found was a really spectacular deep violet-blue. The ecology of these specialized fungal parasites whose hosts are themselves rare or very patchily distributed really fascinates me.

This is literally my favouriate living thing beyond my immediate family. Even the names are amazing: dog vomit slimemould. I mean COME ON.

Scientists are usually pretty tongue in cheek when naming things, but slime mold scientists are especially plain. I love it.

Had one in my garden as well last month! Here we call them “Witch’s butter” [0]. It was there for some days and seemed to move a bit over those days but then crumbled indeed.

[0] https://nl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heksenboter

One of my most vivid memories of high school was observing a slime mold in a petri dish under a microscope in biology class. It was fascinating to watch the liquid inside the tubes of the slime mold flow in one direction, then stop and flow in the opposite direction. You can see that behavior in this video clip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elqwn7k2Wwk&t=451s

At elapsed time 7:49, the flow stops and reverses.

The rest of the video, which is entitled "Slime Molds: When Micro Becomes Macro", is interesting as well.

Ze Frank is the healthiest thing I've discovered on the internet for a while (when you need to laugh), see related video on Slime Molds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OltvGZUvpvw

[edit- spelling]

ze frank has been one of my favorite things on the internet since before youtube :)

what's your power move?

https://youtu.be/SBPXd6GZPqQ

Fabuloso

Frank Gang! So good.

That was the most information-dense Ze Frank vid I've ever seen. Very little of the trademark humour (except for bebbes) but very interesting indeed & seriously worth a watch.

That's saying a lot since they're all relatively information dense compared to other animal youtubers. And the footage he compiles is always the star of the show. Simply ama-ze-ing.

Science hippies made an appearance, too.

First thing I thought of was Ze.

His original 365 days of vlogging experiment still makes me emotional when I think about it. That was the power of the internet realized.

Great video ... tastefully and humorously uses phrases like science hippies and godzilla. Thus is like the honey badger narration for slime molds.

For anyone who wants to watch more on slime molds, I recommend the documentary The Creeping Garden

Edit: link: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3913550/?ref_=ext_shr_lnk

The first half gets you a great understanding of slime molds. The second half goes into some more experimental art that uses slime molds. Depending on your interest, you could fast-forward during sections of the second half and stay fort beautiful shots.

This is really cool! Not at all the mental picture I had for "slime molds," even having heard of them before.

The little drawing/paintings(?) of them around 2 minutes in are also gorgeous. Really cool skill for a naturalist to be able to sketch/draw/paint what you find.

Caught my eye too. I'm pretty sure they were signed reduced giclee prints of larger original watercolors. If they were originals, they're executed in an uncommonly small format which is somewhat ridiculous from an artistic efficiency and control standpoint. I've known some miniature artists in the past and it tends to be the 'only' thing they're in to, but eccentricity dies hard...

Brilliant! And for forgive me for jumping in to recommend one my all-time Philip K. Dick favorites: Clans of the Alphane Moon, as it features the memorable and adorable Lord Running Clam a telepathic, intelligent and friendly slime mold from Ganymede.

Observing nature is really fascinating, and it's everywhere - even in your fridge! Should you find something you can't identify try https://inaturalist.org/ which makes recording, sharing, discussing, identifying and correcting audio or still image media based observations easy and is of great utility to biologists tasked with understanding and environmentalists protecting our remnant biodiversity. Just be sure to mark cultivated specimens as 'casual'. Also a great lead-in for kids to many branches of science, structured thinking and (in the lead-up to Christmas) fun stuff like microscopy.

It wasn’t entirely clear in the parts that I watched, but my understanding is that slime molds are actually “social” amoeba. They often crawl around as loners, eating whatever they can find. But if they run out of food, they start sending out chemoattractants to all of their buddies in the neighborhood. They all crawl together and create a fruiting body (a spore) that eventually will break off in the wind and land somewhere else. Hopefully, in greener pastures. Those fruiting bodies are what you see in these videos. Amazing creatures, they live on the brink of multicellular eukaryotes.

There are many groups of slime-mold-like living beings and most of them are not closely related and they have evolved independently the ability to make multicellular fruiting bodies, as an adaptation to the life in terrestrial conditions (where an elevated position is needed to enable the dispersal of spores by the wind, like from mushrooms).

In most of these groups, they live as single amoeboid cells and they aggregate into multicellular fruiting bodies only for reproduction. Besides most such groups that are eukaryotes (nucleated cells), there is even a group of bacteria, the Myxobacteria, which have the same ability of making multicellular fruiting bodies.

Besides the many groups of slime-mold-like living beings, with similar mushroom-like fruiting bodies, there is a single group of those which have been known by humans for the longest time and which are the only for which the name "slime molds" (the English translation of Myxomycetes) should be applied in the strict sense.

For the slime molds properly, the term "social amoebae" is not appropriate as it is for the others, which live single and then aggregate into multicellular fruiting bodies.

The true slime molds spend most of their life as multicellular or multi-nucleated (so-called plasmodia) bodies, which are big enough to be seen without magnifying instruments, which is why they have been known many centuries before the others. As seen in the linked videos, the true slime molds are blobs that move slowly around, usually eating bacteria.

https://youtu.be/RVe94qa1ar4?si=xGVDzqv4-4W8b4dR

Japanese transit system design influenced by Slime mold finding the optimal connection routes to food, placed strategically mapping Japanese systems. Believe this clip is extracted from a Joe Rogan episode

https://bibdigital.rjb.csic.es/en/records/item/12395-a-monog...

( Permalink https://bibdigital.rjb.csic.es/idurl/1/12395 )

A link to a pdf of the resource with color plates of the watercolor illustrations by Gulielma Lister that inspired one of the naturalists featured in the video.

They are in the later pages and they are beautiful.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulielma_Lister

If this interests you I suggest Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake. Fungi are fascinating.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50664430-entangled-life

I'm sure you are aware of this, but to make sure everyone understands: Slime molds aren't fungi. As we learned more about them, there became categorized separately.

The time lapse of the yellow mold was amazing.

And it kind of reminds me of cellular automata… maybe because that’s my current distraction. With so few rules they begin doing fascinating stuff.

They're also pretty good at urban planning it turns out. nature is full of simple things with deceptively complex behaviors.

https://phys.org/news/2022-01-virtual-slime-mold-subway-netw...

The Beauty and Diversity of Slime Molds - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34890433 - Feb 2023 (1 comment)

Scientists create living smartwatch powered by slime mold - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33976876 - Dec 2022 (3 comments)

Coordination Headwind: How organizations are like slime molds - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31727144 - June 2022 (10 comments)

Slime molds’ complex ability to detect mass from a distance - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29114686 - Nov 2021 (42 comments)

The 'blob': zoo showcases slime mold with 720 sexes that can heal itself (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27617789 - June 2021 (2 comments)

Simulating Slime Mold - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26694857 - April 2021 (1 comment)

Show HN: Play with Shaders Inspired by Slime Mold - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26619871 - March 2021 (23 comments)

A single cell slime mold makes decisions without a central nervous system - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26285926 - Feb 2021 (76 comments)

How the humble slime mold helped physicists map the cosmic web - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25602327 - Jan 2021 (1 comment)

In slime molds, evolution selects 'loners' who refrain from collective behavior - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22727215 - March 2020 (33 comments)

Evolution selects for 'loners' in slime molds - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22658691 - March 2020 (10 comments)

Slime molds remember, but do they learn? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17491547 - July 2018 (11 comments)

Slime Molds solve the travelling salesman problem - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4304427 - July 2012 (3 comments)

Slime Molds- single cell organism solves shortest path algorithm - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4303169 - July 2012 (1 comment)

Using A Slime-Mold To Calculate Minimum Spanning Trees - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3970427 - May 2012 (20 comments)

Slime mold grows network just like Tokyo rail system - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1072876 - Jan 2010 (21 comments)

Communication networks inspired by slime mould - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1071093 - Jan 2010 (1 comment)

This was delightful. Thank you for the reminder that a simple hobby driven by curiosity can be the source of so much joy.

humans are not much different from slime mold,,,actually all live is just evolved version/part of gigantic slime mold. humanity might take wrong turns or die out,,,but it the end it does not matter,,,live/slime mold will go on

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