I was giving my friend Mary a garden tour the other day, which always puffs me up a little, inasmuch as I know a lot of the names of the plants in case anyone asks; and instead of asking, Mary pointed excitedly at a blob I do not remember planting and said it looked like I had a slime mold! And since I am in possession of a tattered, vestigial Biology degree, I made mumbly noises in the affirmative, although I had not personally ruled out that it was some sort of excreta from an unwell animal.

Really, the only polite thing to say when someone points out a slime mold is “How about that,” when you really mean “Eww.” And as often as I’ve seen one, I’ve never had much of a grip on what it actually is, or what it does for a living. Or who it does for a living.

A slime mold, it turns out, is a member of the Protista kingdom. In more innocent times it was called Protoctista, not to be confused with proctocyst, which is something you don’t want in a place you don’t want it. The experts changed the name to Protista in much the same way terms for undervalued groups of people have to keep changing over the years once the new term acquires the purported stain of the old. Meaning, whatever you want to call it—it’s still a slime mold.

That’s just one protist. Others include bacteria and algae and even kelp. Protista comes from the Latin for “Who the hell knows,” out of the Greek for “None of the above.” A protist is any organism whose cells contain distinct, membrane-bound nuclei but is not a plant, animal, or fungus. Generally speaking, protists consist of one cell. Kelp is multicellular but is considered too simple-minded to qualify as a plant, and is chiefly employed keeping snoozing otters from drifting off to sea.

“Otter snooze,” by the way, is not a thing, but if it were, it would probably be the name of a slime mold. Others include the famous Dog Vomit slime mold, Fuligo septica, after the Latin for “putrid soot,” and also known as Feces of the Moon and, in Norway, Troll Cat Puke. (A troll cat is an associate of a witch that sucks milk out of cows and spits it in the witch’s pail, before going inside and licking up cream. It’s hard to see how such an entity got any traction in a culture, but one early Scandinavian folklorist postulates that it was invented by Gypsies who stole milk and were looking for cover. This was in the nineteenth century, before Gypsies were reframed Roma, and later Protista.)

The exceedingly cool thing about these slime molds, which can be up to a foot or more in size, is that they are a single cell. A single cell with thousands of nuclei, all of which divide at the same time like it’s Spring Break. There’s one that weighs over forty pounds. And they can move, nearly an inch a day. They do this by motivating their internal pudding into little arms and legs, and follow their direction, seeking out the nutrients and proteins they need. Scientists have set up mazes for slime molds with dead-ends and rewards, and have discovered that although the slime mold goes every which way at first, it quickly deletes the trails that dead-end, by retracting those arms, and ultimately heads straight for the prize. Models of this behavior have been trotted out on a computer and the results have been shown to replicate the national highway system almost exactly.

Current slime mold research funded by the Heritage Foundation is dedicated to achieving the most efficient privatization of the prison and educational systems.