Sometimes the most remarkable wildlife is found on the smallest scale. A message from my daughter saying she had found Chocolate Tube Slime (Stemonitis spp.) on a fallen log on Elstead Common was too good to ignore. A short while later we were examining a log covered with slime moulds at several different stages of … Continue reading "Slime Moulds Sharing a Log"
Introduction Slime moulds belong to the phylum Mycetozoa and are placed here within the Kingdom Protozoa. They are remarkable eukaryotic organisms with a life cycle that combines features of both amoebae and fungi. Modern classifications place them within the Amoebozoa, although their exact Linnaean rank varies between classification systems. The phylum Mycetozoa is traditionally divided into three classes: … Continue reading "Phylum Mycetozoa (Slime Moulds)"
Protozoa and Chromista are two eukaryotic kingdoms that contain a wide variety of mostly microscopic or structurally simple organisms. Their classification has shifted repeatedly over the past century, and different taxonomic systems still draw the boundaries in different ways. For the purposes of this project, I follow a traditional Linnaean framework, using the same broad … Continue reading "Protozoa and Chromista"