X-Files Episode | Season 6 Episode 21 | Field Trip | My favorite episode
This is my all time favorite episode.
This was the only episode where I remembered the whole of it from childhood. So I watched it again after 27 years. Much less scary, but still I can take this episode more seriously, since similar organism actually exist.
I pretend to know what was the basis for this episode.
These organism are interesting, because they are no plants, animals or muschroom. Slime molds are capable of crawling and actively changing their location. Contrary to their name, they are not actually fungi, but rather single-celled macroorganisms similar to amoebas, which are capable of spectacular movement during certain stages of their life cycle.
They actively search for bacteria, fungal spores, and decaying plant matter. When one of their tentacles encounters food, the entire cell mass flows in that direction. If their environment dries out or their food runs out, they crawl to a brighter, drier place to reproduce by forming spores. Although they have neither a brain nor a nervous system, they are able to “remember” where they have been based on the mucus trails they leave behind as they crawl. Using this method, they navigate mazes effectively and can even form optimal transportation networks.
I heard a story that, immediately after the Chernobyl accident, the local slime molds gathered in much larger masses for some reason and formed a larger “body.” One local resident reported that this large mass “climbed onto” one of his sleeping hens and began to devour it. Although it had killed the hen by morning, they didn’t let it “consume” her completely. Instead, they burned the hen’s carcass along with the slime mold.
What might have actually happened? When an animal dies, billions of bacteria and microscopic molds immediately begin to multiply on its carcass. The slime mold seeks out precisely these bacteria and spores. So when the slime mold crawls onto the carcass, it is actually engulfing (via phagocytosis) the microorganisms growing on the surface of the carcass.
I have a photo showing a researcher holding a normal seedling and a Chernobyl seedling side by side. The Chernobyl one is about 10 times larger.
The radiation likely damaged the DNA, preventing the plant cells from dividing. Although cell division had stopped, the existing cells swelled to many times their normal size due to plant hormones (auxins) and water uptake. The seedlings looked the same morphologically, but because of the gigantic cells, the entire plant became bloated and “giant-like.” Almost without exception, these seedlings died within the first few weeks because their distorted cell structure made them unviable.
In addition, a Hungarian doctor visited the surrounding villages before the evacuation, and the villagers brought him enormous strawberries and mushrooms. The villagers said they had never seen them grow this big before.
The villagers brought the strawberries as a gift to the doctor, and he was shocked that the locals knew so little about radiation. The villagers also reported seeing mushrooms (such as chanterelles) that were larger than usual; they told their stories with great excitement and refused to believe how much danger they were in. The doctor instructed the villagers to throw away the strawberries and not to pick anything in the forest, not even from their fruit trees if they showed any signs of damage. After a while, the villagers began to feel ill and started visiting the doctor, believing he could cure any ailment they had. The doctor had to treat them with his meager supplies. They didn’t tell him anything either, but he had to fill out the paperwork. In almost every case, he tried to arrange for the patients to be evacuated, specifically to the best hospital in Moscow, based on his recommendation. Over the course of days and weeks, the situation went from strange to catastrophic.
Probably the plants were exposed to a sudden, but not yet lethal (sublethal), dose of radioactive iodine and cesium, their bodies triggered an emergency response. Under the influence of radiation stress, the plants temporarily pumped incredible amounts of growth hormones and sugars into their crops to ripen the seeds as quickly as possible, in order to ensure the survival of the species before they perished. This sudden “hormone surge” did indeed result in fruits (such as strawberries) that were much larger, juicier, and more spectacular than normal during the first few weeks. The following year, these plants had either died or produced a deformed, meager crop.
Although the active “digestion” of the hen remains biologically impossible for slime molds, the extreme compaction and massive body could have been entirely realistic in the days following the disaster. If the soil is suddenly exposed to intense radiation, microscopic, individual slime mold cells living in the environment release chemical distress signals (cAMP). And as an escape mechanism, hundreds of thousands of cells fuse into a single gigantic, macroscopic mass to collectively attempt to migrate out of the danger zone or to form a single massive protective shell. Thus, immediately after the disaster, locals could indeed see masses of slime in their yards of a size and density never seen under normal circumstances.
But it is still interesting to imagine that somehow such an organism, that is in this episode could actually exist, and hunt for even humans. I had nightmares when I was a kid, and I didn't want to go to forests and caves for a few days after seeing this.
The biggest that I know of here is this (largest ever found was almost a meter across and weighted 18 kg):
