Video is, unfortunately, in German. If you don’t speak German, consider making up your own (PG) translations to key scenes and sharing them with us in the comments! : )

In the beginning you see the free-living amoebae (I think) happily wandering about on their own with some fungal filaments (called hyphae, high’-fee) growing at the top of the screen. Then the ameobae start aggregating — crowding after each other like sports fans filling a stadium. The species uses a famous signaling molecule called cyclic AMP (cAMP) to coordinate their union, and it passes through the swarms in pulsing, spiraling waves noticeable at about 1:35. If I’m using my extremely poor knowledge of German correctly, the narrator is nothing that hundreds of thousands of amoebae join together in the process. They do not fuse membranes; they retain their cellular identity.

Notice that some amoebae get left behind or lost in the process. At 2:47 you can actually see some break out of line and go back to being  little amoebae at the very tail end. After the spiraling and pulsating business is done, the mass stretches into a slug and crawls off. At some point between forming the slug (also called a grex) and making the sporangium (the house where spores are made), the amoebae get it on and mix some genes.

When the slug decides conditions are perfect, it stops, puddles up, and then stretches skyward. The lucky amoebae who will become spores riding up the stalk like an elevator. Those stalk cells get the rotten end of the deal — they must sacrifice themselves to ensure their comrades can reproduce. This little detail has led scientists to study these organisms in order to better understand altruism and cheating in nature. What they’ve found is that, as ever, things are not always as they seem. Some would-be stalk cells indeed give their lives, but others buck the system by cheating. Yet if everyone did, the system would break down entirely. There are, as you may imagine, some very interesting dynamics and mathematics governing this system.

Finally, a roving madsnail goes on a rampage wantonly destroying the beautiful slime mold gardens. Stupid animals.

Incidentally, D. discoideum is the species I wrote about in January in which some strains were recently discovered to practice agriculture, or something close to it, by taking bacteria of their preferred noshing type with them in their spores so they have a guaranteed food source when they land. And still more recently, scientists published an article in Science (see here and here) they may even have tissues — and use two signaling or regulatory proteins related to the ones animals use to organize their embryos during development. This seems to mean the common ancestor of slime molds and animals (whatever *that* might have looked like) was using ancient versions of these proteins to arrange itself, and its descendants — both slime molds, and you — inherited these same proteins and are still using them to organize their bodies, in their different ways.

Cellular slime molds represent one of life’s many experiments in multicellularity. You are the product of another. So are plants. And so are fungi, and brown and red algae and some blue-green algae — and there are many more. Other experiments seem to have been abortive; recently this article revealed that blue-green bacteria (aka cyanobacteria) dabbled in multicellularity many times. Remember: evolution isn’t a goal-directed endeavor, although in certain etremely successful groups (vertebrates, beetles) it may seem that way.

To see a different cellular slime mold species that makes violet sporangia on slime mold candelabra, see here. Spectacular.

Finally, I’d like to note I have a new favorite German word : Schelim. As in “schleim mold”. : )

HT to this post at Small Things Considered for the discovery of this wonderful and educational German film.

If all goes according to plan, this website will be making its move this weekend from frazer.northerncoloradogrotto.com to being truly hosted at theartfulamoeba.com (right now I employ masking to make that work). That may mean the feed will change and you will need to resubscribe, but I’m not certain yet as I have yet to consult with my volunteer tech department. Rest assured I’ll do my best to make the transition as seamless as possible, and the feed may not need any updating on your end at all. If for some reason it does stop working, just go to theartfulamoeba.com and hit the little orange RSS feed subscribe button at the upper right to resubscribe this blog to your feed reader.

In addition, if you have any links to my blog on your site, the links will break unless you sub theartfulamoeba.com for frazer.northerncolorado.grotto in the root once the transition happens. Finally, if you have a link to this blog in general from your blogroll, etc .(thank you! Very honored by that!), make sure the link is to theartfulamoeba.com and not frazer.northerncoloradogrotto.com

I’m making this move to make things less confusing for readers (what the heck is frazer.northerncoloradogrotto.com?!) and in preparation for some big changes: I hope to attempt join to the Nature Blog network and Researchblogging.org soon and I figured it would be best to get the tech stuff squared away before I complicate things further.

In any case, theartfulamoeba.com, artfulamoeba.com, theartfulamoeba.org, etc., will all continue working no matter what happens. Bear with me, faithful readers, and in the meantime, enjoy this movie of an amoeba strutting its stuff. This phenomenon by which amoebae move is called “cytoplasmic streaming“. I love that the amoeba seems to “change its mind” several times about whether that top pseudopod (arm) should be expanding or contracting. : )

In Russia, amoeba study YOU.

OK, giant deep-sea amoebae that roll around like possessed dust bunnies? AWESOME. The 411. Though this group had just been discovered in the Arabian Sea in 2000, it seems it was still a surprise to find them *leaving tracks* (although I should emphasize no one can actually see them move in real time. This sounds like a job for the BBC’s magic time-lapse camera). They are testate amoebae, or ameobae that make shells called tests (a few other deep sea protists like foraminifera also make shells called tests, and I just discovered that Chris Taylor over at Catalogue of Organisms just happens to have coincidentally published on the foram version yesterday.). This species, Gromia sphaerica, fits into the Gromiidea on this tree. Just look at all the uncharted territory and things you’ve never heard of. Space is not the final frontier. . . not by a long shot. Not yet.

The bigger, non-motile existing deep-sea protozoans Matz refers to in the video are probably xenophyophores, an outrageously bizarre group alluded to here before. You’ll just have to wait on a post about those another day. And there’s probably lots more giant deep sea protists I don’t know about yet. Readers?

The big take-home message of Matz’s discovery (or at least what they’d like us to take home) seems to be that we could really be misinterpreting Pre-Cambrian fossil trackwaves — that is, the fossil tracks of organisms that predate the blossoming of most modern animal groups in an event called the Cambrian Explosion, ca. 550 million years ago. These tracks can be found in fossils as old as 1.8 billion years (yes, that’s billion with a pinkie to the corner of the mouth). These tracks were for many years interpreted as early modern animals for whom we just didn’t happen to have fossils. But what if they were giant protists? Or something else? Possible, and probably not surprising given the fossils we do have of Ediacaran creatures, they bizarre early animal(?) forms that predate the Cambrian explosion and are the first fossils of complex multicellular organisms we have. They all seem to be soft and, for lack of a better term, pillowy. Yes, like Charmin.

Will we ever know? Probably not. But you never know. A fossil of a recognizable ancestor of a modern animal keeled over at the end of one of these tracks might settle things. On the other hand, simple tracks do tend to look alike. And with hundreds of millions of years on hand, there’s plenty of time for lots of really weird things we’ll never know about to have made them.

You know what this video reminds me of, of course . . .

The poor little guy who gets it in this video is a little ciliate flagellate(single-celled organism with a long propeller-like propulsive tail) named Chilomonas, according to Psi Wavefunction (thanks Psi!). This little drama is one example of the billions of such daily struggles that go on every day in the soil and water all around you. With our daily lives so full, it’s easy to forget.

This process of eating by engulfment is called “endocytosis” by biologists, which is a fancy term for “into the cell”. Specifically, this is “phagocytosis”, or cellular eating. Many cells can also perform pinocytosis, or cellular drinking, where cells can ingest small bubbles of water. Plasmodial slime molds (oft mentioned and beloved at this blog) start out as single amoebae like this, doing pretty much this the exact same thing in the soil. When they fuse to form a plasmodium, they’re feeding the same way — just at 5 Jillion X.

In the meantime, here’s a great picture of an artful amoeba, the gracefully named Chaos diffluens, which has officially dethroned my previous favorite scientific name, Borrelia burgdorferi (the spiral bacteria that cause Lyme Disease). If I were an amoeba and had a name this bad a**, I’d have it tattooed on my pseudopod.