Metamorphosis is everything

Well, there are changes of all sorts from here to there. I'd like to tell of one such interesting organism that does a lot of changing in its life. This is the life cycle of the slime mould.
It is an amoeba, a single celled creature. This amoeba eats bacteria and fungal spores on decaying logs. It is sort of the anti decay. When the amoeba is starving it excretes a cellular chemical picked up by neighboring amoeba. these amoeba then join it as one multicellular organism. This is the pseudoplasmodium. This stage is when the mass of cells breaks down cell walls, and becomes a massive plasma membrane with multiple nuclei. This mass eats away until it too starves. when it starves the cells become individuals again with varying size, but work as a single organism of multiple cells to move to open air. Once in the open this slug starts fruiting, and out of dying amoebas grows a stalk full of spores.

These spores then are released into the air as sex cells. When the spores land, they release a new single celled amoeba. This will however stay a single amoeba unless it comes into contact with another amoeba. Once this happens, the life cycle will start again.
The evolutionary relevence is this, it shows that individual cells can become a unit to work together. What if the slime mold never fruited, and continued as a multicellular organism? What if the spores released multiple celled amoeboids? It is a simple way of saying, single cells can become multiple celled organisms. That's pretty cool.


We all undergo changes. In personality, of mind, in philosophy. Is it so hard to say that biology does too?