SPREAD across the North West’s rich and varied countryside is one of the most diverse kingdoms of life – but, despite many people having seen these strangely beautiful organisms, little is widely known about the fascinating life forms called slime moulds.
This is about to change as the University of Chester Press publishes an environmental biologist’s account of more than five decades of research into these organisms, which have benefits for both agriculture and medicine and are neither slimy nor mouldy!
In Biodiversity in the North West: The Slime Moulds of Cheshire, Professor Bruce Ing, explains what slime moulds are, how they fit into the ecological environment of Cheshire in its broadest historical sense and provides a detailed catalogue of all the species ever recorded in the district.
Formerly classified as fungi, slime moulds share some of the same characteristics as that species but also some of the characteristics of protozoa – the most basic of all living creatures – and as such are in a class of their own.
Although Prof Ing’s studies span 54 years there are still many opportunities for research into this life form, such as using how slime moulds can be used to improve soil fertility or how they could help in certain areas of medicine, such as the treatment of varicose ulcers and blocked vessels.
Prof Ing, a world authority on slime moulds, has studied the group since 1957 when, as a first-year undergraduate at the University of Cambridge, and already a keen field botanist, he visited the local Madingley Wood to collect mosses.
Having found a strange specimen on moss, he collected it and took it back to the Botany School, where no-one was able to identify it.
After some research Prof Ing found a secondhand booklet on mycetozoa (as slime moulds were called then) which included a picture of his find, leocarpus fragilis.
He said: “I now knew the group, the name of my organism, and the names of the authors of the booklet, Arthur Lister and his daughter Gulielma.
“Back in the library, I soon found their 1925 monograph with beautiful coloured illustrations, not only of my leocarpus, but of hundreds of other amazing looking objects – I was hooked!”
