His fellow taxonomists on this expedition include British researcher David Mitchell Ted Stampfer, a researcher from New Mexico and from Stephenson’s West Virginia lab visiting German scientist Martin Schnittler and Stephenson’s research associate, Randy Darrah. The myxo section is coordinated by Stephenson, who is also a biology professor at Fairmont State College in West Virginia. I am here astraddle the North Carolina-Tennessee border on a spectacular Indian summer day with a team of myxo taxonomists participating in the All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory (ATBI), a 15-year effort to identify and catalog as many of the organisms occurring in the 808-square-mile park as possible. Not surprisingly, they fascinate some biologists and amateur naturalists. In their plasmodium stage, they show a quality that could be called intelligence: chopped up and dropped into a labyrinth, they will put themselves back together and start to move, avoiding dead ends and heading unerringly for the prize-more food. Slime molds are like nothing else on earth. These are slime molds, or myxomycetes (myxos), of the kingdom Protoctista, the least understood of the five kingdoms of life, the others being animals, plants, fungi and bacteria (Smithsonian, July 1991). And despite their present puffball-like appearance, the navy-blue balls are not fungi, nor do their stalks attest to the sedentary life of a plant. Earlier in their lives these "critters," as their taxonomists call them, slithered around as oatmeal-like globs-plasmodia-hunting bacteria with carnivore self-confidence. Forest ecologist Steve Stephenson bends over a decaying stump and parts a curtain of moss so I can see a tiny stand of what looks like shimmering, miniature dark-blue soccer balls atop toothpick stalks. We are traveling in Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
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