Slime molds

A Collection of Six Common Slime Molds and Some Information to Help You Spot Them began when my casual noticing of slime molds turned into a deeper curiosity about them during the wet and warm May of 2024. I was walking around a nearby lake and started to notice different slimes growing all over the place, so I took photos and tried to identify them when I returned home. There were a few that appeared to just be white dots and I couldn’t find anything that looked like that, but I did find a type of slime that started as white dots and developed into clusters of tubes standing on tiny stalks. I watched time lapses of this development and learned just how quickly these slime molds could develop. I went back the next day to see if the white dots had changed, and sure enough that had turned into a structure completely unrecognizable from what I had seen the day before.

In early 2025 I decided I wanted to create a simple, easy to follow resource about a few slime molds I had personally seen and understood to be quite common. In my search to learn more about slime molds I realized how our knowledge of them is constantly changing and evolving, and so historical resources were no longer entirely accurate, and online resources were splintered and didn’t have all the information I wanted in one place. The key thing that I felt many resources were lacking was a visual explanation of how the slimes develop over time, because depending on what stage you see a slime at it can be hard to identify it based on the commonly documented stages and main identifying photos. Because of this I knew I wanted to include something that visualized the development of slimes. So, I selected six slime molds I had seen and photographed and proceeded to research them through books, research papers, time-lapse documentation, apps, and more.

What I ended up creating was a simple, pocket sized beginners introduction to a few slime molds. I wanted it to have a somewhat novel structure and not be a common book size, so I made it 6.5” by 2” with short and long pages incorporated into the format. Each slime’s section includes its latin name, common names, what it grows on, when it can be found, its dimensions and a description of it, several photos, and a series of illustrations showing its structure as it grows. There is also an introduction, a glossary, and additional resources and notes. As with many of my projects this one began as a topic I wanted to learn more about but could not find the right resource to learn about it with. Design is problem solving, and as is often the case for me the problem I tackled here was creating a resource that I wanted to have available in the world, not just for myself but also for others.