https://www.quantamagazine.org/out-of-sync-loners-may-secretly-protect-orderly-swarms-20200521/

My mind was completely blown the day I learned about Grexes… from Lyall Watson. These are meta-organisms composed by individual slime-molds (amoebae) in times of relative famine…

“Early clues emerged after Corina Tarnita, a mathematical biologist at Princeton University, and her colleagues turned their attention to the cellular slime mold Dictyostelium discoideum. Typically, it lives as a collection of solitary amoebas, with each cell eating and dividing on its own. But when threatened with starvation, up to a million of those cells can coalesce into a mushroom-like tower. Around 20% of them create a stalk, sacrificing themselves so that the rest can move to the top of the structure and form spores, which can last for months without food. Ultimately, water and wind disperse those spores to new and potentially more nutrient-rich environments.”