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THE ASTORIAN • TuESdAy, JANuARy 4, 2022
Are You Hard of Hearing?
Stephani Gordon/Oregon Public Broadcasting
Slime molds are decomposers of the forest, often found
on rotting logs. They may look like fungus, but they can move.
Seattle amateur
scientist helps unlock
secrets of slime molds
By IAN McCLUSKEY
Oregon Public Broadcasting
Anyone who has hiked in the
Northwest has seen a slime mold, but
likely didn’t know it. Some appear
like tiny balls of fungus on rotting
logs, or strange patches of gooey
orange globs. Some look like fuzzy
white mold, and some are a slimy,
bright yellow blob, descriptively
nicknamed “dog vomit.”
“Slime molds have a PR prob-
lem,” said Kelly Brenner, a Seat-
tle author and naturalist. “For one,
they’re called slime molds and that’s
not appealing and it’s not representa-
tive of how beautiful they really are.”
Despite their name, slime molds
are not actually molds. Often found
on rotting logs, they’re commonly
mistaken for fungus. They appear in
a variety of bright colors, but aren’t
plants. They can move but are not
animals. They are single-cell organ-
isms, unique unto themselves —
quite possibly one of the strang-
est things to be encountered in the
woods.
“There’s iridescent, there’s the
cotton-candy pink ones, there’s some
that look like champagne flutes with
fireworks in them, and you look
closer and closer and the closer you
get, the more it reveals and the more
spectacular they are,” Brenner said.
Brenner is one of a long line of
amateur naturalists to champion
these overlooked and underappre-
ciated organisms. After centuries of
obscurity, slime molds may be finally
getting their overdue attention.
A date for one
“Locally, I don’t know anybody
who goes out looking for slime
mold,” Brenner said. “So it’s not
like I have a friend that I can call up,
‘Hey, let’s go on a slime mold date.’”
So she goes alone.
She packs a camera, a flashlight
and pocket knife, and sets off to one
of her favorite parks.
She combs the woods, peeking
into dark crevasses of stumps and
scanning under fallen trees. While
kneeling down for a closer look, she
hears a jogger coming toward her on
the trail. Brenner glances up with a
slight nod of hello, but the jogger
passes without noticing her. She goes
back to scanning the rotting wood
with her flashlight.
“What are you looking for?” asks
a woman walking her dog.
“Slime molds,” answers Brenner.
“OK,” the woman says, as she
continues on.
Brenner chuckles to herself.
“No one ever asks, ‘what’s a slime
mold?’”
What is a slime mold? Good
question. Scientists have been try-
ing to figure out slime molds since
the mid-1800s.
As single-cell organisms, they
would seem relatively easy to cat-
egorize and understand. But slime
molds seem to defy standard biology.
Individual “cellular” slime molds
can come together and form blobs,
seemingly communicating between
cells to coordinate synchronized
pulsing to propel them toward food.
“Plasmodial” slime molds can
also grow into a blob, but take
another tact. They literally merge
together, dissolving their individ-
ual cell walls into a larger single cell
of many nuclei. These are the gooey
globs that put the “slime” in slime
molds.
As if straight from sci-fi, slime
molds can be cut into many pieces,
then fuse themselves back together.
They can dry out and go dormant for
years, then be rehydrated and ready
to slime again.
If anything, they are survivors.
They are one of the planet’s oldest
living organisms, dating back 600
million years, and possibly as far
back as a billion years.
More than 900 species of slime
molds have been discovered. They
can be found all over the earth,
including deserts and in the Arctic.
Until recently, slime molds have
been left to amateur naturalists like
Brenner to collect, and taxonomists
to figure out how to classify.
A curio of slime molds
Brenner first learned of slime
molds when researching for her
book “Nature Obscura,” about the
hidden nature that can be discov-
ered in urban areas. Wanting to learn
more, she searched for a collection
at an herbarium. The closest that she
could find was in Canada. So she
started a collection of her own.
She has converted a room in her
home into a classic Victorian-style
curio collection. Floor-to-ceiling
cabinets with glass doors hold an
arranged assortment of specimens
that she’s gathered from her explo-
rations in nature. Among the many
biology books are tiny wondrous
items like bones, seashells, and
fossils.
Brenner pulls open a drawer of
one of the curio cabinets. It is filled
with small kraft paper boxes. Each
one is neatly labeled in ballpoint
pen with the Latin name of the slime
mold specimen inside.
After Brenner filled the top
drawer with her tiny boxes of slime
molds, she filled the one below it.
“I had to get another cabinet in my
closet and start new drawers,” Bren-
ner said.
When asked how many slime
mold specimens she has amassed,
she pauses. She’s been so focused on
the searching, she hasn’t actually tal-
lied all of her findings. “Roughly in
the 200, 500 range, thereabouts,” she
estimates, then adds: “and counting.”
Slime mold champions
Finding slime molds takes tim-
ing, Brenner has learned. Like mush-
rooms, they seem to pop up on
decaying logs on warm, humid days
following rain. They seem to vanish
just as quickly.
Brenner pries a piece of mulchy
bark off with her pocket knife and
holds it up to look at through a mag-
nifying lens. A single strand of her
hair falls in front of the lens. She
chuckles, noting that the slime mold
is thinner than the strand of hair.
“The top of these skinny stocks, a
lot of them nod, like they’re tired,”
Brenner said.
Brenner is not conducting
research as an accredited scientist or
on behalf of an academic institution.
Rather, she’s exploring the woods as
a naturalist in the classic sense: her
curiosity of the natural world inspires
her to explore, observe, record, and
share her findings.
Brenner is following the footsteps
of one of the first champions of slime
molds, Gulielma Lister. Lister was
a British naturalist, who, with her
father, identified hundreds of slime
mold species in the late 1800s, and
published the first comprehensive
book, which she illustrated herself.
Lister would correspond with
anyone interested in slime molds,
regardless of their academic back-
ground. One unexpected connec-
tion was Emperor Hirohito of Japan
whose own curiosity had been
piqued by slime molds. Finding
species around his summer palace
inspired the emperor to write a book
like Lister. The ensuing 296 pages,
published in the 1930s, became
the first book in Japanese on slime
molds.
Sixty-five years later, Japanese
researchers surprised the world
when they published results of their
slime mold experiments.
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