[FRIAM] The theory of everything

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I don't know why I inverted the Mach number. [sigh]

What do you mean "when things get tough"? Wikipedia says when food is in short supply. But that sounds like the trigger to become social and, once collected, there might be another (set of) trigger(s) to reproduce? Or is it the case that, once together, they will inevitably reproduce? So, 3 collective behaviors reproduce, move, and harden up? I can imagine that the signal(s) to harden up can be more non-local than the signal(s) to reproduce, whatever it(they) might be.

On 7/6/20 2:11 PM, thompnickson2 at gmail.com wrote:
> Speaking of Reynolds numbers?
> 
> A great many years ago I had an undergraduate honors student who wanted to work with slime molds.  These are social single celled organisms that, when things get tough, flow together to form a stem and a fruiting body.  From the fruiting body are distributed spores for the next generation. Only some small percentage of the original cells get into the fruiting body, so they pose a problem of the "group selection" type.  We were wondering whether we should be thinking of fruiting bodies as like dandelions or like burrs.  A little reflection about scale and viscosity suggested that dandelions was a stupid model.  The student devoted some time to mimicking with a probe what would happen if an ant brushed up against a fruiting body, and found that, indeed, they were extremely sticky.  We were overjoyed.  But then the student  fell in love, and I never saw him again.  

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