Gazing at the green microbial mats the bacteria form, he has a sobering thought: "Yellowstone National Park may be the best place there is to reflect on the fact that we are all pond slime.
The detection of a single piece of pond slime, one alien microbe, on some other world would rank as one of the greatest discoveries in the history of science.
We might dream of green men with big eyes, ants with hive minds, or even cuddly octopuses as an antidote to cosmic loneliness, but what we are most likely to find, a growing number of scientists say, is alien pond slime.
Ducks will also clean algal slime and duckweed from ponds.
Immediately, there was a firsthand glimpse into that new world, through a row of microscopes trained on mosquito larvae, nematodes, slime molds, algae, and pond bacteria.
As a result, new sources of freshwater had to be sought upstate, and the filled-in sludge and slime of the Collect Pond became the unplanned foundation for a century of Lower Manhattan slums.
Back in the shed, a white almost-powder has separated itself from a brown pond-slime substance.
Slimes of algae bloom on irrigation ponds.
These slimes are being disposed into tailing ponds owing to their high alumina content (10 15%) despite having good iron values (45 60% Fe).
Thus someone tuning into "Zoboomafoo" at any given moment might see two men in their 30's leaping (one like a frog, horizontally; the other like a migrating trout, straight up, for comparison's sake), or getting drenched in slime, or falling fully clothed into the Animal Junction pond.
