Science Fair Project

If one had the resources and time, a nice experiment would be to try removing all animal life above the unicellular level. Then wait for a billion years or so to see what evolved to fill the niche.

How about slime molds? These very curious characters spend the early part of their lives as unicellular amoeboid hunters. After a bit of feasting, some will start sounding the chemical trumpet, and they spontaneously assemble into a slug like organism which will crawl around for a while until it finds a suitable spot to stand on its head and turn itself into a miniature mushroom, with the former rear end becoming a mass of spores to be dispersed and start over.

How tough would it be for some of them to learn to prosper and diversify in the slug form?

Maybe some parasitic plants might develop some motility?

Richard Dawkins, in The Ancestor's Tale, has our last common ancestor with the slime molds (and the rest of the amoebazoans) back at co-ancestor 35, between the fungi and the plants. For the experiment I mention, it might be useful to make the division point (where animals are separated) between co-ancestors 31 and 32, the sponges and the choanoflagellates.

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