Today I present you with a macro photo of a slime mold, which I found growing in my garden mulch this past summer, after an afternoon rain shower. This spectacular specimen is of the “dog vomit” variety, which seems aptly named. Despite that unappealing moniker, this is an excellent example of a slime mold, which are more common than you might realize, but often overlooked due to their ability to appear and disappear again with little warning.
Slime molds are strange…well, whatever-they-ares. They are not actually mold, or even any form of fungus, but rather a myxomycete, which is a classification that I imagine most of us have never seen before. These oddities reproduce via spores, like fungus, but unlike fungus their spores contain a tiny amoeba. When compatible ameobas gather, they fuse. Read that again; they do not gather into a community, but instead fuse, remaining a single organism capable of growing to startling sizes, at least for something single-celled.
Oh, and they can learn. Studies have demonstrated that slime molds predict patterns and solve mazes. And if conditions become unsuitable, slime molds can place themselves in a stasis state and wait.
As if that wasn’t all strange enough, it turns out that slime molds may have a practical – or perhaps impractical – use in the field of cryptography. There was a recent article describing a new device which is best described as a containment chamber for a living slime mold, which uses images of its organic growth to generate cryptographic security keys. A healthy slime mold grows larger and more complex, producing stronger cryptographic keys. And due to the fact that the keys are based on organic growth, they are significantly more complex than mathematically-generated keys, and may prove much more difficult to crack. (Article at Tom’s Hardware)
For a fascinating introduction to slime molds, I recommend Lacy M. Johnson’s What Slime Knows, originally published in Orion magazine and included as part of The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2022.
Otherwise, take a second closer look at any patches of “dog vomit” that appear in your garden…and maybe be kind to it, least it gets any ideas about conquering the Earth.