A Slimy Mold
This fifth-place winner, taken by Alison Pollack, is of a genus of slime mold known as Lamproderma. Slime molds are some of the most unique and barely understood living beings in the world. Once thought to be a group of fungi, they’re now known to be several unrelated groups of protists. What ties them together is their ability to shift from different forms of life depending on the occasion, from free-living single cells to colony-like multicellular bodies that produce spores.
