![]() ![]() Without a way to count their population as a species, we can’t measure whether they are endangered or thriving.Psychalongauts 2 has a bit of side calongtent, and you can take along Lilis sidequest betimes along. As a consequence, we have no way of knowing whether slime molds, as a broad class of beings, are stable or whether climate change threatens their survival, as it does our own. It can choose to “fruit” or not, to reproduce sexually or asexually or not at all, challenging every traditional concept of “species,” the most basic and fundamental unit of our flawed and imprecise understanding of the biological world. A single cell might look to us like a coherent whole, but that cell can divide itself into countless spores, creating countless possible cycles of amoeba to plasmodium to aethalia, which in turn will divide and repeat the cycle again. Though, in truth, “individual” is not the right word to use here, because “individuality” doesn’t apply to the slime mold worldview. When Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was published in 1859, it was on the foundation of this “science,” which had taught white Europeans to reject the idea of evolution unless it crowned them in glory. But Linnaeus’s taxonomy, unlike the systems that came before, gave these prejudices the appearance of objectivity, of being backed by scientific proof. The idea that humans could and should be ordered - that some were superior to others, that this superiority had a physical as well as social component - was deeply embedded in many previous schema. ![]() Over time, Linnaeus revised his classifications of Homo sapiens, naming “varieties” that at first corresponded to what he saw as the four geographic corners of the planet, but which became hierarchical, assigned different intellectual and moral value based on phenotypes and physical attributes. These “ladders” or “scales of ascent,” in turn, inspired the “Great Chain of Being” - the worldview central to European thought from the end of the Roman Empire through the Middle Ages, that ordered all of creation from lowest to highest. When the amoeba encounters another amoeba with whom it is genetically compatible, the two fuse, joining chromosomes and nuclei, growing ever larger, until at the end of its life, it transforms into an aethalia, a “fruiting body” that might be spongelike in some species, or like a hardened calcium deposit in others, or, as with Stemonitis axifera, grows into hundreds of delicate rust-colored stalks. Like fungi, myxomycetes begin their lives as spores, but when a myxomycete spore germinates and cracks open, a microscopic amoeba slithers out. I recognize this curious specimen as the aethalial state of Fuligo septica, more commonly known as “dog vomit slime mold.” Despite its name, it’s not actually a mold - not any type of fungus at all - but rather a myxomycete (pronounced MIX-oh-my-seat), a small, understudied class of creatures that occasionally appear in yards and gardens as strange, Technicolor blobs. The dampness has darkened the flower bed, and from the black mulch has emerged what looks like a pile of snotty scrambled eggs. It is spring in Houston, which means that each day the temperature rises and so does the humidity. ![]()
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