What's this? A favorite question.

TPP's old friend Dr. Chips has a keen eye, something necessary when you look for bryophytes and lichens.  But often when you look closely and carefully, you'll see things you didn't expect and may not know.  In Dr. Chips case, this isn't often, but here we go.  Here's the images of what TPP received this morning from out west in Washington state.

This is actually a fairly common and cosmopolitan organism, but you have to notice it.  These are actually the reproductive structures, not the actual organism itself. When pink like this they have a sort of creamy center, and perhaps this is the origin of the common name "wolf's milk".  The organism is Lycogala epidendrum, and it's been a few years since TPP has seen it, but it is quite singular in its appearance.  The organism that makes these sporangia is a plasmodial slime mold (or mould for my proper readers). Dr. Chips knows what this means, but for others, this organism is a T. rex of the microbial world, a "giant" amoeboid blob consuming any microorganism in its path.  Under certain conditions the plasmodium transform from a mass of cytoplasm into sporangia, and usually only these reproductive structures are seen.  And this is why Dr. Chips contacts TPP; he IDelivers, mostly! 

The Blob - It lives!

Just as the Phactor was getting old enough to go to movies, scifi was all the rage, but the special effects back then were pretty cheesy, so you never got too scared. In 1958 The Blob featured a space alien (back when being alien always meant from outer space, not just somebody from next door) that consumed all life forms. Wow, what a concept! Oh, and who starred in that movie even though he wasn't really cool yet? So imagine what a thrill it was to find out that the blob really exists in the "body" of a plasmodial slime mold, a multinucleate sac of flowing cytoplasm that consumes all life forms it can engulf. See how similar they look? Plasmodial slime molds are the T. rex of the unicellular world, the most fearsome predator on the cellular world. The cytoplasm within the plasmodium flows back and forth in channels formed by stiffer cytoplasm (actins and actin binding proteins), and like waves coming ever higher on the beach with the incoming tide, the plasmodium surges in one direction or another allowing the beast to "crawl" in a amoeboid fashion. The biggest (This one is only about 20 cm across.) and most impressive makes its appearance just about this time of year because people have been spreading bark mulch around garden beds, and all those bacteria and fungal spores are just so tasty, waiting there to be engulfed by a blob of cytoplasm in the form of Fuligo septica, often affectionately called "dog vomit". Often the plasmodium is bright yellow when they appear, but exposure to light stimulates spore formaton resulting in a change in pigmentation and the plasmodium will darken to a brownish mass of spores.