Slime Mold

A slime mold, as complex systems biologist Chris R. Reid so adroitly put it, “is just a little bag of goo.”  While this same description might readily apply to several so-called “reality TV stars,” they are hardly worth an ounce of scientific study—a web search for nude photos perhaps, but not scientific study.  Slime mold, on the other hand, has been the subject of in-depth study at the University of Sydney.  In fact one slime mold in particular, Physarum polycephalum, has managed to coerce several biologists to keep it alive and well in spite of the obvious fact it is really gross in appearance—like a broken egg yolk.

Let me remind you.  A little bag of goo.  Which, for whatever reason, brings to mind something my friend says when he sees a piece of bad work: “Ugly as a bag of mashed assholes,” he says.

Goo.

Slime molds are single cell creatures.  They are often successful creatures, however.  They can achieve mobility and have been known to reach preposterous sizes.  In some instances, these molds can grow up to 30 square meters in size, making them the largest individual cells in the animal world.

Meanwhile, at the Australian laboratory, biologists, for lack of any better direct project mandate, created a walled maze on a petri dish and released a slime mold on the dish. Release may be too strong a word in the case of slime mold.   In the matter of slime mold, the specimen is more or less plopped into place.

The molds placed in the dishes efficiently navigated the maze to find slime moldish treats hidden at various points along the labyrinth.  Without going into a lot of detail, the molds ooze around the dish seeking food.  As they do this, they leave slime trails that map places they have reached previously.  The brainy part of this is that the molds tend to reject traveling on old slime trails, which leads them to clear paths and ever new locations for food.  This is all accomplished with simple chemical reactions. 

Not bad for a bag of goo.

Not bad when you consider that with the brain I have been training all these years I am still incapable of finding a pair of blue jeans that fit me properly.    

--Mitchell Hegman