steve barrett

What do you do when you spot something suspicious? What if that suspicious thing is a mossy floating blob in a rain-collecting barrel in your yard. YOU POKE IT WITH A STICK!

Well, this situation hit close to home for me. Someone close to me, ok ok it was my mom, ran into this mossy object and did just that poked it - the moss turned out to be fur and it all fell out with the slightest poke.

Now bare, the object was immediately identified as a squirrel which must have somehow inadvertently fallen into the barrel while running nearby or trying to get a drink. I wonder how long it had been floating.

Slime molds are one of those oddballs in nature. Originally classified as a fungus, they have recently been found to be entirely different. Slime mold is in essence single-celled bacteria that forms a mass because of how fast they reproduce. Naturally they grow more where there is food and die off where they’ve exhausted their resources. The resulting effect is a creeping goo that seems to think as a whole.

The imagery is spectacular. The new Planet Earth series of nature documentaries took some incredible time-lapse shots of slime mold in action. I’m pretty sure this is the segment from that documentary with some bizarro techno overtop, but I might be wrong about that.