Life as a blob
SARAH LLOYD HAS risen early every morning for the past 10 years hoping to catch sight of bizarre and tiny life forms in old logs and leaf litter in the gullies of the tall wet eucalypt forest on Black Sugarloaf Mountain in northern Tasmania, where she’s lived since 1988. These damp places provide the perfect habitat for slime moulds – organisms that exist only briefly in their most visible form. “They don’t last long in the field, so you have to be quick,” Sarah explains.
Slime moulds are primitive, single-celled organisms that live mostly in moist terrestrial habitats where they feed on bacteria, fungi and decaying organic matter. For much of their lives they exist in microscopic form. But during
