Das Buch vom Schleim

Essentially, slime is just water in molecular chains. But what does that really mean? This seemingly modest material is a phenomenon that spans space and time. Slime surrounds us, always has and always will, something we tend to forget and suppress. Slime occupies gaps and interfaces, moving the big levers of existence. Even within humans, where it cleverly protects sensitive surfaces as a barrier and ruthlessly selects: it nurtures good microbes while sending the bad ones packing. It allows bacteria to bunker down, snails to build walls, and even keeps slime eels away from sharks. At the same time, it is the slime trail that leads the male snail to the female snail, revealing her attractiveness even beforehand. Susanne Wedlich follows the trail of slime through art, culture, and science: Haeckel's primordial slime, which got to play God for a few years; fictional slime monsters and real slime creations from modern research that draw inspiration from natural slimes and seek to better understand the fragility of our body's barriers. Because ultimately, every evolutionary question also has an answer from slime, without which there can be no life. It holds communities and entire biotopes together, as long as climate change doesn't interfere (and yet even that will likely affect it less than it affects us).