Research on Myxomycetes I Prof. Steven L. Stephenson I University of Arkansas I MycoAsia MasterClass

About the speaker:
Dr. Steve Stephenson recently retired from the University of Arkansas, where he taught courses in plant biology, plant ecology, forest ecology, and mycology as well as serving as the mentor for twenty-two graduate students who received their M.S. or Ph.D. degrees. He received his Ph.D. from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in 1977 and was on the faculty of Fairmont State University for 27 years before moving to the University of Arkansas. During his academic career, he has been a Senior Fulbright Scholar at Himachal University in India, a Visiting Scientist at the Australian Antarctic Division, and the William Evans Visiting Fellow at the University of Otago in New Zealand. His studies of myxomycetes (slime molds) have taken him to all seven continents and every major type of terrestrial ecosystem. He is the author or coauthor of 20 books, more than 500 book chapters and papers in peer-reviewed journals, and fourteen science fiction novels.

[@Intelligenthumour]

A person named "Steve Stephenson" is a great match to have teaching about and studying myxomycetes. Very interesting talk and exhibition of various species and the point about myxomycetes potentially having existed as a group for over a billion years makes me wonder if they have been adapted to life on land for that long. A lot of the consensus on terrestrial ecosystems before plants developed, to my understanding, is that top soils as we have them today weren't a reality back then. That it was a product of the interplay of fungi and early plants that largely led to the development of soils that would later dominate terrestrial landscapes. But if the slime molds have been fulfilling these sorts of lifestyles since long before the first land plants then it casts that idea into doubt(which I already am skeptical of it, as it has been told to me). I can't help but wonder if there won't be fossil finds of slime mold sporangia, spores, cysts or even more chemically based evidence for them in fossils to come from before the Cambrian. Maybe something like what was done to Dickinsonia to help prove that it was an early animal could be done on coastal microbial fossils or the macroscopic fossils of the Ediacaran whilst looking specifically for sterols known to be in myxomycetes. I also wonder for those slime molds that are fully aquatic(in their plasmodial form as well) how they interact with microbial mats. Also, the beetles and slugs and ants eating slime molds before reminded me of stinkhorn mushrooms enticing insects to eat, and by doing so, spread their gleba. Brightly colored specimens that readily attracted invertebrates to eat them and in the case of the ant, to be brought underground assumedly.