A group of living things
Amoebas, fungi and animals
Amorphea
You are closer to the many-headed slime mould and mushrooms than to any plant.
Its members' last common ancestor lived about 1.5 billion years ago.
You are part of this group. See how.
You are closer to a slimy yellow sheet on a rotting log and to a mushroom than you are to any plant. That is the surprise of this family. One side holds many amoebas and slime moulds like the many-headed slime mould. The other side holds fungi, animals and their tiny cousins. The many-headed slime mould is more closely related to you and to a mushroom than to a flower or a tree.
They do not share one look. A feeding many-headed slime mould is a wet, glossy network of yellow veins and fans with no limbs or eyes. An amoeba is a pale, ever-changing blob that pushes out rounded foot-like bulges. A mushroom is a cap on a stalk with threads below. On the animal side, a tiny clear swimmer moves with one long tail.
They live almost everywhere there is water and food, from soils, ponds and seas to shady woods. Look for slimy sheets on damp logs a day or two after rain. Mushrooms grow in the same woods, often in autumn. Sizes run from cells too small to see without a hand lens or microscope to mushrooms you can hold and on to a blue whale much longer than a bus.
One cell with thousands of centres
A feeding many-headed slime mould forms when separate cells join into one giant bag with thousands of nuclei and no walls inside. What looks like many cells stuck together is usually a single cell.
A maze solver with no brain
With no brain or nerves, the many-headed slime mould can find the shortest path through a maze. When food is laid out like cities, it grows a web much like the Tokyo rail system.
Fungi are like us inside
In their chemistry and genes, fungi are more like animals than like plants or other organisms. That likeness is one reason fungal infections in people are hard to treat without also harming human cells.