Slime Mold Essay

introduction According to the oxford dictionary the definition of Slime mold is a simple organism of an acellular mass of creeping jelly like protoplasm containing nuclei or mass of amoeboid cells. When it reaches a certain size it forms a large number of spore cases and was formally considered in the kingdom of fungi, however it is now classified in the Protista kingdom because, like other protists, they really don 't fit in with other kingdoms. They are motile like animals but some are unicellular so they cannot be classified as animals. There are several types of Slime Molds. Plasmodial slime molds (such as Physarum polycephalum) are slime molds that form giant, multinucleated cell colonies. ... Cellular slime molds remain as unicellular 'slug-like ' amoeboid protists for much of their life, crawling through leaf matter and decaying matter on the forest floor. A third group, the Labyrinthulomycota or slime nets, are also called "slime molds", but appear to be more closely related to the Chromista, and not relatives of the other "slime mold" groups. What these three groups have in common is a life cycle that superficially resembles that of the fungi. When

Protista contains organisms that do not fit in any other category. Protista is Greek (masculine singular) for the very first. These organism were considered the first eukaryotic forms of life. At some intervals in its life cycle it displays protozoan characteristics and at other times they are fungi like. Protista have organisms that resemble organisms in other kingdoms. Protista can be found in any wet condition and preffer the rain forest temperate conditions and have carateristics of animals and plants. The mojority protista are microsopic single cells. Protista has fossiles that puts the organisms first appearance at approcemetly 1.7 billion years ago. Protista comes from a large group, Phyla makes up the kingdom and there are approximately 900