At the Zoo Vincennes in Paris, recently visitors can see an organism that immediately earned the nickname of the strangest exhibit in the local exhibition. This is not an animal. He has no eyes, ears, mouth or limbs, but he is mobile, can communicate, heal himself, and has about 720 biological sexes. This slime mold is a protist belonging to the amoeba-like group.
These creatures are divided into two fundamentally different species from each other - cellular and acellular. The former are microscopic amoebae, capable of forming a slimy clot that acts as a single superorganism, which is why they are sometimes called "social amoebae". However, here we will talk about the second variety. It is she who is represented in the Paris zoo. This is a cell-free mucus called Physarum polycephalum.
Basically, it is still the same amoeba, but as it grows, only the nuclei, not the cell, divide.
From this description, it is clear that the process leads to the formation of one giant cell - scientifically it is called plasmodium. Scientists have been in some confusion for quite some time as to how slime molds should be classified. Because they, like mushrooms, have spores. This is the initial and final stage of their existence. Upon reaching a certain stage in their life cycle, or in the event that the environment becomes unfavorable, the slime molds disintegrate into spores. However, unlike mushrooms, they swallow food whole, and do not release enzymes that digest it somewhere outside.
Another fundamental difference is that slime molds can move, while mushrooms are only able to do this in fairy tales. Finally, they are distinguished by behavior that can be called reasonable if desired. Research has shown that social amoebas, to make this analogy, are farming. They feed on bacteria and grow them on purpose. Slime molds carry these microbes on themselves and, having moved to a new place, begin to breed them in order to provide food for themselves and their offspring. These are real farmers! Which is extremely surprising when you consider that slime molds do not have a brain.
It has also been established that cell-free representatives of this group of creatures demonstrate something like learning. For example, by eating, they learn to ignore chemicals that are unpleasant to them, but still harmless. Subsequently, this information is stored for a long time and even transmitted to other slime molds, who have never encountered harmful chemicals before. When scientists brought together several different "individuals", they eventually merged into a single being. At the same time, it possessed a memory of an unpleasant substance and was aware of its harmlessness even if only one of its many parts had ever been in direct contact with it. Researchers still can't figure out how this is possible. We will not seriously talk about the presence of consciousness, memory and other cognitive functions in a single-celled creature?
Disputes.
And, finally, about that property, which was put into the catchy title of this article. The number of sexes in acellular slime mold really reaches 720. There is no male or female here - just hundreds of possible subcategories. It's all about disputes that are haploid. Each of them contains only half of the genetic information needed to create a full-fledged slime mold - like an egg and sperm in humans. However, the spores belong to three different sex types, each of which has sixteen varieties. Thus, when a haploid germ cell finds its other half, the result is highly unpredictable.
Promotional video: