Slime Molds Have 11 Sexes

Margaret Price's poem, Slime molds Have 11 Sexes was published in the Gay and Lesbian Review in 2003. It illustrates how we are still on the frontier of mixomyceits discovery. Sarah Lloyd, a leading slime mold researcher based in Tasmania, thinks that they are the most remarkable organisms on earth. Some years she might find lots of fruiting bodies on the same log, a hotspot, but the next year there might not be any. Why this happens remains a mystery to the scientific community. The fruiting bodies form when Plasmodium breaks into a number of small portions which develop into stalked units. So do they persist as spores or sclerotia,