AS ONE A field of genetically identical amoebas in Texas raises the possibility that cells might organize on much larger scales than once thought.
Posted on 03/24/2009 11:28:22 AM PDT by JoeProBono
After producing superlatives like the world’s biggest statue of a jackrabbit and the nation’s most unpopular modern-day president, Texas can now boast what may be its most bizarre and undoubtedly its slimiest topper yet: the world’s largest known colony of clonal amoebas. Scientists found the vast and sticky empire stretching 40 feet across, consisting of billions of genetically identical single-celled individuals, oozing along in the muck of a cow pasture outside Houston. “It was very unexpected,” said Owen M. Gilbert, a graduate student at Rice University and lead author of the report in the March issue of Molecular Ecology. “It was like nothing we’d ever seen before.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
AS ONE A field of genetically identical amoebas in Texas raises the possibility that cells might organize on much larger scales than once thought.
I thought this was a story about Obama voters.
LBJ?
Too bad when these things encounter their first fire ant mound in the pasture, and promplty cease to exist.
What a bunch of lowlife scum, and i DON'T mean the amoeba.
darn.. ya beat me to it.
Roundup, or just spray Kerosene on it i’d say. Watch these jackasses want to protect it.
Captain, it’s like nothing we’ve ever seen before.
I wonder if they were shrooming when they came across this.
Unless, of course, they can find some way to disown him. Which isn't beyond the realm of possibility.
more illegal aliens?
It is. The field is near Houston.
LOL! Young Steve McQueen. One of his first films. He was so cool.
Well, a gratuitous swipe at W. How surprising.
No surprise, then, that they probably mean one of the myxomycetes, a slime mold, rather than an amoeba.
Amoebas are different animals all together.
In the first stage slime mold cells move around independently, then they suddenly form into a unified coordiated mass that can move around. At some signal the mass will clump up, differentiate, and form fruiting bodies that spread spores. The picture in Post 1 is of a myxomycetes beginning to form spore stalks.
First thing I thought of was a slime mold.
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