🧬It's time to Read the Slime!
#Slimemoulds are weird, wonderful, and still understudied fungi-like organisms. You can help understand them.
Join the new FunDive citizen science campaign to find and sequence them 👉 fun-dive.eu/en/get-invol...
#ReadTheSlime #CitizenScience #Barcoding #FunDive

Thrilled to join @jzpawlowska.bsky.social ’s group for a postdoc. I'll be still working on #myxomycetes! We’ll explore how species concepts shape our view of their distribution with conservation in mind. Plus, citizen science via the FunDive project: sequencing + public help = species discovery!

My regular column: Hello from the past, or what I find in old herbaria. Why don’t they make such stylish packs anymore? #herbarium #specimens

Read the new issue here: imafungus.pensoft.net/issue/5041/

Our paper about good practice for species description in myxomycetes is among the first 10 published in @imafungus.pensoft.net with @pensoft.net publisher. Enjoy #openaccess
doi.org/10.3897/imaf...

Lowkey regretted that I quit smoking a while ago #herbarium #old_specimens

Challenge accepted

The only good morphological match seems to be Didymium macquariense, but this species was described (and is still known) from one locality, subantarctic Macquarie Island. A bit far from Adygea. Well, maybe somebody will sequence both one day, and we will know.

But then I saw spores! Instead of the usual pale, warted spores, here spores were dark, large, with amazing crests and ridges on the surface. What that could be?

Another strange #myxomycete from TAAM #herbarium.
A Didymium, collected 50 years ago in Adygea, North Caucasus. At first glance, I thought it was one of pretty common species of D. iridis-complex.

How to describe a new species? Why studying slime moulds matters?
Check out my popular science article in ERR Novaator.
(In Estonian, activate google translation on a page)
novaator.err.ee/1609529668/d...
#slimemoulds #myxomycetes #biodiversity

Cześć!

And Amoebozoa are usually not even included in charts like this

Myxophoto of the day: Cribraria cancellata. Wnite mycelium is a myxoparasitic fungus, probably Nectriopsis sp. #slimemoulds #myxomycetes #herbarium

Herbarium, later collected by Kastanje, constitutes the main part of the current myxomycete collection at TAAM. This is what I call a healthy tradition.
Photos: Prof. G. W. Martin; Diachea obovata (=Craterium obovatum) from Martin's herbarium; illustration of the same species from "The Myxomycetes".

How did Martin's herbarium end up in Tartu?
Apparently, specimens were sent in the '90s from the US at the request of the Estonian professor Erast Parmasto, who maintained many international connections. They were sent to help another mycologist, Veiko Kastanje (a student then), learn to ID myxos.

G. W. Martin is a classic figure in 20th-century myxomycete science, authoring >100 names of myxos and fungi, and the essential books "The Myxomycetes", "The Genera of Myxomycetes". He worked mostly at the University of Iowa, remained an active researcher until advanced age, and passed away in 1971.

My first post here.
American myxomycetes in Estonia! I started digging into the herbarium of The Estonian University of Life Sciences (TAAM). The first and most astonishing discovery is that part of George Willard Martin's collection from the USA is quietly residing here in Tartu.