What do chocolate, scrambled eggs, raspberries and dog vomit have in common? They are all common names for slime mold!
Slime mold is uniquely beautiful, smart, weird and strange looking. The part we see is the fruiting body of the mold. There is a lot going on underground that we don't see.
Mushrooms form in a similar way to slime molds, but slime molds are not mushrooms. Though they were once considered to be a fungus, we now know they are not related at all. They are not a mushroom. They aren't an animal. They aren’t a plant. They aren’t a fungus. They aren't even a mold!
Slime molds are a single-celled organism, similar to an amoeba. This unique type of single-celled organism has no brain, but it contains multiple nuclei. Like an amoeba, they engulf bacteria and digest it inside their bodies. A fungus, on the other hand, digests food externally.
Chocolate tube slime mold
This mold grows upright in clusters with brown tube-shaped projections held up by slender stalks. These fruiting bodies are the reproductive structures of the organism. The slim stalks hold the spores that resemble cocoa powder — illustrating this slime mold's chocolate name.
There are three different categories of slime molds: individual solitary cellular slime molds; slime nets, which form when cells clump together to share food; and plasmodial slime molds. Chocolate tube slime mold is plasmodial. These slime molds have the fascinating ability to ooze along slowly, about 1 inch per hour, to feed on microorganisms.
The life cycle of chocolate tube slime mold
This mold isn't always chocolatey brown. When it travels, the plasmodium is a white, slimy, undulating blob. Chocolate tube slime mold spends most of its life cycle this way, as a glistening, spiderweb of oozing material moving slowly throughout the forest floor from leaf litter to wood piles.
Words to know
Amoeba: A single-celled animal that catches food and moves about by extending fingerlike projections of protoplasm.
Nucleus: The positively charged central core of an atom.
Eventually, they run out of the resources they need for survival — moisture and food in the form of bacteria, algae and other microorganisms — or the environmental weather conditions change. These stressful situations cause the slime mold to creep up from the forest floor and begin to form spores on their fruiting bodies. They extend their slender spore-coated stalks like a pipe cleaner (another common name for this species) about 5 millimeters high so their powdery spores have access to wind, animal or insect movement. These spores are ready for a journey. They float through the air to find a new suitable habitat — and start their life cycle over again.
Is chocolate tube slime mold harmful?
It might look a little frightening, like a clump of hair on a tree in the middle of the woods (tree hair is another one of its other common names), but chocolate tube slime mold is beneficial. Slime mold does a great job of breaking down tough organic matter, like wood or mulch, to bring nutrients to the soil. This slime mold is found growing in clusters on rotting wood.
Intelligence and transportation
Have you ever done a maze on a worksheet? Or maybe you went through a corn maze where you had to find your way to the exit. Were you able to make it through the maze on your first try? Did you have to plan out your route or retrace your steps?
Slime molds do not have brains like humans and animals do. They have a different kind of intelligence. Researchers set up mazes to challenge the slime mold’s ability to travel. Not only did the slime mold work its way through the maze, but within 24 hours, it found the shortest, most efficient way through it.
The researchers came up with a more demanding challenge — a map of a large city. They put small pieces of food on the map representing the railroad stations and the suburbs surrounding the big city. The slime mold made a pattern between each piece of food (from railway station to suburb) that was nearly identical to the real railway system in the city! The slime mold found the shortest, most efficient way to travel across the map.
They tried this same experiment with the highway design for the United States and Canada. Again, the slime mold managed to achieve the goal in a similar way that the human engineers planned out the country's roadways.
Professional engineers have begun to use slime molds to double check their work to be sure they are designing the most efficient methods of transportation. Although slime molds do not have brains, they have proved to function in a similar way to the higher order brain that humans have.
Other types of slime mold
In Will County, chocolate tube slime mold has been observed in June, July, August and October, according to iNaturalist. There are many different types of slime mold that can be found in Will County. Their common names reflect the appearance of the species. Can you picture what these species would look like based on their names?
Scrambled eggs
Red raspberry
Wolf's milk
Honeycomb coral
Dog vomit
Wasp's nest
You can search for these species on the iNaturalist website or app to see if your imagination lines up with what the organisms actually look like.
There are many different species of slime molds slowly oozing around our forests. The hot, humid weather conditions we experience during the summer months are ideal for finding slime molds. When you hit the trails or are out exploring nature, look around wood piles, wood chips and leaf litter on the forest floor. You might be lucky enough to come across some of these fascinating organisms.
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