Talk:Slime mold

Slime mold has been listed as one of the Natural sciences good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can reassess it. Review: December 4, 2023. (Reviewed version).

This  level-4 vital article is rated GA-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects:

Protista High‑importance This article is within the scope of WikiProject Protista, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of protists and protistology on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.ProtistaWikipedia:WikiProject ProtistaTemplate:WikiProject ProtistaProtista articles High This article has been rated as High-importance on the project's importance scale. project's importance scale .

Archives

1

This review is

transcluded from Talk:Slime mold/GA1

. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: Esculenta (talk · contribs) 21:49, 17 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I'll review this one. Comments coming this weekend. Esculenta (talk) 21:49, 17 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Drive-by comment

• A section on habitats seems to be missing (e.g., are they all terrestrial, or are there aquatic species, too?). --Jens Lallensack (talk) 15:03, 18 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • All terrestrial, at least I've never seen anything to the contrary. Chiswick Chap (talk) 15:09, 18 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

    What about [1]? Apart from terrestrial/aquatic, I still feel that a general section on habitats is necessary. Jens Lallensack (talk) 15:18, 18 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

    • OK I'll look at it. Chiswick Chap (talk) 15:26, 18 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
      • Added habitat descriptions and refs per group. Chiswick Chap (talk) 09:51, 19 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Initial comments

• Having had a look at some other sources, it seems to me that the article is currently missing quite a bit of encyclopaedic information, and does not meet
  criterion 3 (Broad in its coverage). Let me know if you agree and how you'd like to proceed. Esculenta (talk) 20:24, 19 November 2023 (UTC)[reply
  ]
  • We'll work through the comments, obviously. A general remark however is that since the slime molds are not a clade but a general description, the usual sort of thing – chapter on habitat, chapter on distribution, etc – doesn't make a lot of sense as these things vary by group. Further, since older texts basically equate "Myxomycetes" (Myxogastria) with "slime molds", they aren't covering the slime molds as now understood, just one clade out of several.
    • I disagree entirely. If I'm reading an encyclopedia article about the topic "slime mold", I don't care whether the group is monophyletic or not, I expect to read about some generalizations about where "slime molds" grow, followed by more specific examples to illustrate the diversity of the "group". The sources I have in front of me don't seem to have a problem of devoting space to the topics of distribution and ecology (for example), applied to the paraphyletic lot of them, so I don't see why Wikipedia shouldn't do similar. Esculenta (talk) 22:41, 19 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    • I quite see the desire. I'll see what I can add that doesn't do violence to the updated facts.
    • Added section on Distribution, habitats, and ecology. More below.
• if van Tieghem described the Myxomycetes and the Acrasieae in 1880, how could Anton de Bary place these groups in Mycetozoa in 1859?
  • Edited.
• I think that the work of G.W. Martin should be mentioned (1932, 1960), who argued that slime molds were a derived group of fungi
  JSTOR 3756254
  . As a result of his influence several early textbooks included slime molds as part of the Fungi
  • Added.
• there seems to be a jump from 1885 (Lankester's contribution) to 1956 (Copeland’s classification) without mentioning any significant developments in between. How about Olive's separation of the dictyostelids and acrasids (Olive 1975, The Mycetozoans);
  • Added.
• the work of Patterson & Sogin (1992) that proposed that the dictyostelids diverged before plants, animals, and Fungi ("Eukaryote Origins and Protistan Diversity, pp. 13–46 in The Origin and Evolution of Prokaryotic and Eukaryotic Cells) and subsequent debate; taxonomic history ends in 1969. Has nothing interesting happened since then?
  • Added.
• please make it more explicit what the source is for the cladogram
  • Each slime mold group is placed, per the cited sources, in the tree of the Eukaryotes.
• For interest, might want to add that the record-holder for size (20 kg) is Brefeldia maxima (from Ing 1999, p. 4)
  • Added.
• the image of Physarum polycephalum is visually interesting, but I think this section would greatly benefit from have a life cycle image
  • Added image with life-cycle description.
• "forming labyrinthine networks of tubes in which amoeba without pseudopods can travel." here pseudopods links to pseudopodia, which should have been linked the sentence earlier
  • Fixed.
• "which have sluglike amoebae have eruptive pseudopodia" eh? and what are "eruptive pseudopodia"?
  • Fixed, and described.

Missing info (imo)

• how many slime molds are there, and how these numbers are divided into the various slime mold groups
  • This is, per my general comment above, basically adding apples and oranges. But we can say something for the main groups.
    • This book might be a good source for a total # of taxa. Esculenta (talk) 02:34, 20 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Added discussion of totals.
• no mention of phagocytosis?
  • Added.
• what was the first slime mold to have been discussed/described scientifically? Lycogala epidendrum by Pankow in 1654, says Introductory Mycology (4th ed.) p. 776
  • Added.
• no mention or use of Martin & Alexopolous's work "The Myxomycetes" (1969), which was a widely used and influential textbook
  • Added.
• no mention of how these things are studied, or the "moist culture chamber", introduced by Gilbert & Martin in 1933 (Myxomycetes found on the bark of living trees. Iowa Studies Nat. Hist., 15: 3-8), which is now the standard apparatus used to grow these creatures. Also, check out this useful article. Esculenta (talk) 02:42, 20 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Added.
• there's no section that clearly describes/compares/contrasts the common morphological features of slime molds. Alexopolous says that four types of plasmodia are recognized (phaneroplasmodium, aphanoplasmodium, protoplasmodium, and a fourth type intermediate between phaneroplasmodia and aphanoplasmodia, found in the Trichiales). Apparently there's also four type of fruiting bodies (sporangia, aethelia, pseudoaethelia, plasmodiocarp). These should be described and explained. What are the parts of the fruiting body? (hypothallus, stalk, columella, pseudocolumella, peridium, capillitium, pseudocapillitium). Can we have a bit of text discussing the spores? How large are they in general? Colour? Are spore characteristics typically used as taxonomic characters? What about the spore-balls of Badhamia?
  • General point, again: this differs per group (Myxogastria is just one of the clades), and there's little we can say that will apply across all the slime mold clades. See the next item for the issue, which applies to many of the comments raised.
  • Specific point: we can certainly say something per (sub)group on reproduction, but we shouldn't go far into the intricate details of each group's reproductive parts. I can see there's a tendency to want to write the equation "Myxogastria = slime mold" and then go into detail from old textbooks, but the equation is wrong and would seriously unbalance this article.
    • Perhaps more like a "Comparative morphology" that describes and compares common morphological features of different slime mold groups. It would help present morphological terms used in later sections. Esculenta (talk) 01:37, 20 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    • Another way to think of it: a newbie interested reader reading the article in its current state would finish without even really learning what a "sporangium" is, despite it being the prominent and interesting fruiting structure in several of the images. Seems like that content (and similar) is missing.
      • Added. The newbie should clearly not be confronted with enormous Latinate terms like "pseudocapillitium", this is not a morphology textbook.
• There are several common lichen growth forms; are there similar growth forms that occur in this polyphyletic group? I see for example the dog vomit is sponge-like, Trichia varia is thick with tight berries, and at least one species has a sac-like sporangium. Esculenta (talk) 01:54, 20 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Well they're very diverse. The characteristic form of many species is the stalked sporangium.
• no section on distribution? One book I have (Myxomycetes A Handbook of Slime Molds (2000) has an entire chapter on this, and includes sections on snowbank species, high-latitude species, desert species, and taxa associated with various microhabitats, like bark, forest litter, dung, and soil.
  • Added.
• another chapter in this book discusses slime mold ecology, which seems to be only sparingly referred to in this article. Topics include trophic stages, substrate relationships, fruiting season, insect associates, slime mold-eating fungi, relationships with bryophytes, etc.
  • Added some. Overall the article has grown by some 60% now.

More comments

• the plasmodial strand speed record is held by Physarum polycephalum, not Fuligo septica as implied by the positioning of the text.
  • Added.

• there's repetitive information in the "Cellular slime molds" and "Chemical signals" subsections
  • Edited.

• should be mentioned that cyclic AMP is a common cell signalling compound found in all types of life forms (reader currently might otherwise get the impression it's a unique compound discovered in slime molds)
  • Glossed.

• "An amino group (NH3) and a carboxyl group (COOH) of the glutamic acid are blocked respectively by a propionyl group and an ethyl ester. An amino group on the ornithine molecule is blocked by a lactam ring." This is material I don't think needs to be in this article; it's highly niche, and the ultimate physiological effect of the chemical blocking described isn't mentioned.
  • Removed.

• What I think would be more interesting is a sentence or two about the diversity of acrasins. Only two are mentioned in this article; how many are known?
  • Added. Answer is not many; most remain unknown as of 2023.

• I think this subsection should discuss chemotaxis somewhere (unusual that this article does not mention this word)
  • Added. I've been trying hard not to fill the article with polysyllabic Greek-based Latinates, of which there are plenty in this field.

• as a small addition to "Chemical signals", it could be mentioned that "slime moulds release calcium while foraging and that calcium is attractive to other slime moulds" (as least regarding Physarum polycephalum), and that acellular slime molds release "stress" compounds that allow conspecifics to avoid the same area.
  doi:10.1098/rstb.2019.0470
  • Added a sentence.

• do they have any direct relevance or applications in human contexts, such as biotechnology? Slime mold spores as allergens?
  doi:10.3390/cosmetics10010003
  This last source also helpfully tells us "The great biodiversity of slime molds, with more than 900 species currently recognized...".
  • Added several.

• is there any slime mold that's been assessed by the IUCN, or have any appeared on a regional redlist?
  • I found this but not evidence of listing.

• any examples of cultural use of slime mold as food? yes!
  • Added.

• coprophilous slime molds are a thing (e.g., genus
  doi:10.1016/j.protis.2010.09.003
  • Added.