I recently read, Untamed: The Wildest Woman in America and the Fight for Cumberland Island, by Will Harlan, which tells the story of Carol Ruckduschel. And while the main subject of the book is fascinating, I was amazed by an altogether wilder creature—slime molds.

An example of cooperation in nature, this excerpt (p. 227) on slime molds particularly struck me: “And bacteria—the oldest and most numerous organisms on the planet—cooperatively share survival information with each other. Perhaps most amazing of all are the humble slime molds. They live as individual amoeba scattered widely across the forest floor until they are starving. Then hundreds of them simultaneously crawl together and merge to form a slug, so they can seek out food as a collective organism.”

I had to check this out. I like finding examples of natural phenomena stranger than my fiction of Adam Hope. And, yep, it is truly strange! Slime molds do a variety of things—crawl slug-like, oozing along at 1.35 mm per second; grow fruiting bodies that release some of the single-celled beings as spores, while the others stay behind supporting the fruiting body and thus sacrificing themselves. Do a Google image search for slime molds and prepare to have your mind blown. Or at the very least, distracted for a few moments from the disturbing human-related news at hand.

Short articles with pictures:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/16/ma...

https://forestsociety.org/blog-post/s...

Quick educational watch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nx3Uu...

For a more in-depth look:
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/04/sc...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elqwn...