The Kingdom of Misfits

This piece was originally published in the Are.na Annual vol 7: pool, which now available in the Are.na Gift Shop.

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It is May, and I can sense a dormancy ready to burst open like a door in a storm. Somewhere in the forest, on the rotting bark of a downed oak tree, two swarm cells butt heads, absorb into each other, and form the feeding body of the slime mold Badhamia polycephala. First a mass of vibrant, glossy yellow, B’s plasmodium spreads in thread-like rivulets to a tidal edge, sensing forward and outward for fungal and bacterial cells to consume. After their food runs low and the temperature is just right in the dark of night, B completes the next phase of their lifecycle. No longer plasmodial, B becomes a sea of delicate fruiting bodies barely visible to the eye, miniature sculptures of green-tinged charcoal on golden stalks. In tomorrow’s pale sun, they will dry into a flurry of spores to begin again.

In my work as a citizen scientist, I’ve stumbled upon dozens of slime mold species in the Prospect Park Ravine, Brooklyn’s last remaining forest. The more I’ve learned how to see slime molds, the more they appear. If I crouch down next to a fallen tree and look very closely, I may find a spectrum of yellow, red, white, or metallic creatures that shimmer and ooze, orb-like or webbed or crystalline. It is difficult to imagine that I once didn’t know that slime molds existed at all, let alone here in plain sight, but it seems that slime molds have been esoteric for some time. Because of their occasional mushroom-like appearance and their ability to move, they have been taxonomically misclassified as fungi (kingdom Fungi), animals (kingdom Animalia), plants (kingdom Plantae), and even a fantastical and fluid mix of all three. Slime molds were eventually placed in the kingdom Protista, which I see as the historic kingdom for misfits. By definition, kingdom Protista is a broad categorization of any single-celled organism that historically wasn’t thought to be an animal, plant, or fungus. Brought together not necessarily by genetic relation but by defying human understanding, protists inhabit the cracks in the landscape of scientific research. Kingdom Protista still contains a diversity of creatures, from slime molds to amoebas to microscopic organisms that feed on both other organisms and sunlight.

In the greater scope of slime mold existence, human misunderstandings are a small dot on a much larger timeline. Slime molds have existed for a minimum of one hundred million years, and potentially as many as one billion years. Unlike the extinct prehistoric creatures of textbooks and museums, the slime mold genera captured in fossils and amber are still in existence today and are even abundant within Prospect Park. Many slime molds have achieved this deep resilience through a cycle of single-celled limbo in which they can pause, cycle, or surge through a range of their life stages. As some of the most adaptive beings on Earth, slime molds flowed before grasses existed, before primate ancestors split from rodent ancestors, and well before glaciers covered the planet — and they are still here, in a time when glaciers, animals, and plants all stream out of existence.

Before I’d ever encountered slime molds in the forest, I knew of them through the work of Toshiyuki Nakagaki, a Hokkaido University professor and biologist. In his famous 2010 study, Nakagaki demonstrated that the slime mold Badhamia polycephala can “architect” a miniature plasmodial model of the Tokyo Metro when the existing stations are represented using oats — a preferred food of captive slime molds — in a Petri dish. The internet was abuzz with how a “brainless” organism achieved the work of a human engineer, and slime molds became a mind-bending proposition that humans haven’t correctly placed the limits of more-than-human intelligence. But to me, the study instead demonstrates that humans don’t have a definitive understanding of intelligence overall. Slime molds came under a scientific spotlight because they efficiently moved from oat A to oat B, but to give a prehistoric species recognition based on the very modern, very human phenomenon of rail transit finds meaning within the biased confines of linear time.

Plasmodial slime molds instead have the option to manipulate and step outside of linear time. They can ooze and feed indefinitely when ecological conditions are ideal, or rest in the passive states of cyst or sclerota if they aren’t. Slime molds can form fruiting bodies to cycle back into spores that can remain dormant for years. When I learned of the Tokyo Metro experiment, I was moving through my own life cycle, exiting a phase of career expectations for efficiency and growth and entering a new phase of rethinking my career entirely. Badhamia polycephala modeled fluidity, autonomy — but also captivity, as the species is now much more prevalent in laboratory settings than in forests. With the strong desire to see a wild B. polycephala living on their terms, I began searching for them in the Ravine despite them never having been recorded there.

I didn’t recognize B when I first encountered them, a single step away from a well-tread hiking path. Many slime mold species’ plasmodia have similar colors, habits, and diets — making identification an intensive experience that involves tracking a plasmodium daily and waiting for their more identifiable fruiting bodies to appear. I watched B move and feed for a week, and then a second week, until I approached their log to find a miniature grove of grey and golden fruiting bodies. B created new life based on millions of years of lived and genetic experience, not engineering knowledge or a proclivity for ultimate efficiency. Since the first B, I’ve stumbled on Badhamia polycephala four times in the same stretch of public forest. I’d like to think that each plasmodium is a descendant of the first B, carrying the genetic knowledge that they helped accrue. As I watched the most recent B’s yellow tendrils fan and stream over a white patch of fungus, I felt overcome with gratitude that this creature with ancient origins could survive here, on this unsuspecting place on Earth. I could observe B here and perhaps one day even write about their world, but I could never know more than what they showed me as a human outsider.