[.ca] Myxomycetes: A Handbook of Slime Molds (ISBN 0881924393)

As Strange as Any Life from Mars Could be!:
The slime molds are generally little noticed, but very strange life forms that could easily fit in a science fiction book. The swarm cells and myxamoebae unite to form first an amoeboid zygote, then the strange, crawling, plasmodium stage, and finally the fungus-like fruiting body. The plasmodia can be (in the case of Fuligo) large yellow pulsating crawling blobs that suddenly appear on people's lawns. Others are less noticeable, but often brightly colored. I have seen one of these plasmodia in my life- a bright pink blob that disappeared into the ground when I raised a rotting log in the Pinaleno Mountains of Arizona. I was certainly startled! Stephenson and Stempen have written an excellent book on these strange critters in "Myxomycetes: A Handbook of Slime Molds." It fills a gap in the literature on natural history. It is my hope that more people will be able to appreciate these neat organisms through the descriptions, excellent line drawings and well-rendered color plates. I will disagree with one reviewer's dislike of the describer's name after the scientific name, however. It is there for the convenience of other taxonomist as least as much as the vanity of the describer. If I know that Physarum nutans was described by Persoon it tells me something about where I should look for the original description and may also give me some idea of when the name probably originated. Also Physarum cinereum (Batsch) Persoon tells me that Batsch wrote the original description, but placed the species in a different genus, which was than changed to the present genus by Persoon. Thus such "vain" additions are often important to other workers in the field. I do agree with the same reviewer that some further discussion of how slime molds are classified might have helped an otherwise excellent book. However, I am also fully aware that the classification is still in flux and no final answers may yet be possible until DNA studies are done (and maybe not even then!). Read this book if you find the weirdness of the world fascinating! Better still, use it to find and identify slime molds. Good hunting.