Award-Winning Slime
This is neither an award nor a sculpture. It’s the fruiting body of a slime mold – a structure that helps the slime mold reproduce and spread. Fruiting bodies contain spores that are released into the environment and have the potential to start a new slime mold colony of their own.
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DownloadAward-Winning Slime
This is neither an award nor a sculpture. It’s the fruiting body of a slime mold – a structure that helps the slime mold reproduce and spread. Fruiting bodies contain spores that are released into the environment and have the potential to start a new slime mold colony of their own.
What am I looking at?
This is the fruiting body of a slime mold. The structure in the center of the image (1) releases spores into the environment, allowing the slime mold to reproduce and spread. The shiny surface at the bottom of the image (2) is the leaf upon which the fruiting body grew.
Biology in the background
Despite their name, slime molds are not actually either molds or fungi. They are a diverse collection of single-celled organisms. These microorganisms form a cooperative group, working together to feed, grow, and reproduce. This particular slime mold belongs to the genus Lamproderma, which currently contains 57 different species.
These fruiting bodies grow to about 0.75 millimeters tall, or roughly 10 times the width of a human hair.
Technique
This image was created using digital macrophotography techniques.
Alison Pollack, @marin_mushrooms