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( Permalink https://bibdigital.rjb.csic.es/idurl/1/12395 )
A link to a pdf of the resource with color plates of the watercolor illustrations by Gulielma Lister that inspired one of the naturalists featured in the video.
They are in the later pages and they are beautiful.
Ze Frank is the healthiest thing I've discovered on the internet for a while (when you need to laugh), see related video on Slime Molds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OltvGZUvpvw [edit- spelling]
That was the most information-dense Ze Frank vid I've ever seen. Very little of the trademark humour (except for bebbes) but very interesting indeed & seriously worth a watch.
Edit: link: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3913550/?ref_=ext_shr_lnk
The first half gets you a great understanding of slime molds. The second half goes into some more experimental art that uses slime molds. Depending on your interest, you could fast-forward during sections of the second half and stay fort beautiful shots.
If this interests you I suggest Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake. Fungi are fascinating. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50664430-entangled-life
Earlier this year, I found a big yellow blob in my garden with no idea what it was. It disappeared the next day (basically baked in the sun) then reappeared a few days later several yards away. The color in person was really striking! It turns out it is a Jasmine slime mold [0]. It has been creeping around my garden off and on ever since. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuligo_septica
This is literally my favouriate living thing beyond my immediate family. Even the names are amazing: dog vomit slimemould. I mean COME ON.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elqwn7k2Wwk&t=451s
At elapsed time 7:49, the flow stops and reverses.
The rest of the video, which is entitled "Slime Molds: When Micro Becomes Macro", is interesting as well.
Japanese transit system design influenced by Slime mold finding the optimal connection routes to food, placed strategically mapping Japanese systems. Believe this clip is extracted from a Joe Rogan episode
It wasn’t entirely clear in the parts that I watched, but my understanding is that slime molds are actually “social” amoeba. They often crawl around as loners, eating whatever they can find. But if they run out of food, they start sending out chemoattractants to all of their buddies in the neighborhood. They all crawl together and create a fruiting body (a spore) that eventually will break off in the wind and land so…
In most of these groups, they live as single amoeboid cells and they aggregate into multicellular fruiting bodies only for reproduction. Besides most such groups that are eukaryotes (nucleated cells), there is even a group of bacteria, the Myxobacteria, which have the same ability of making multicellular fruiting bodies.
Besides the many groups of slime-mold-like living beings, with similar mushroom-like fruiting bodies, there is a single group of those which have been known by humans for the longest time and which are the only for which the name "slime molds" (the English translation of Myxomycetes) should be applied in the strict sense.
For the slime molds properly, the term "social amoebae" is not appropriate as it is for the others, which live single and then aggregate into multicellular fruiting bodies.
The true slime molds spend most of their life as multicellular or multi-nucleated (so-called plasmodia) bodies, which are big enough to be seen without magnifying instruments, which is why they have been known many centuries before the others. As seen in the linked videos, the true slime molds are blobs that move slowly around, usually eating bacteria.
Ze Frank is the healthiest thing I've discovered on the internet for a while (when you need to laugh), see related video on Slime Molds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OltvGZUvpvw [edit- spelling]
His original 365 days of vlogging experiment still makes me emotional when I think about it. That was the power of the internet realized.