"Painting" with slime molds using natural pigment?

[Anna Sagatov]

Hello!  I'm love to know if anyone has tried "painting" with slime molds using pigments.  What pigments have worked for you?  I'm interested in dying their oats with beet juice...thoughts?

[Heather Barnett]

I know it does pick up some pigmentation, I noticed it when grown on coloured agar, and others have mentioned colour picked up from pigment or bacteria. Try beets and see what happens...!

[Dr. John Yates]

We will give it a try in due course. And will be interested to see any further results of this kind on Facebook.

[Sarah Roberts]

Hi Anna,

Prof. Adamatzky has done all sorts of fun stuff with food colouring and Physarum polycephalum. Worth having a snoop round some of his other papers too.

I had a great time with Physarum polycephalum too, using fluorescent powder, a technique developed by Dr. Simon Park. I used this brand in the hopes that it would be nice & clean for my slimey friends, but maybe I'm just being soft & you could just buy a big cheap bag from Brodie & Middleton or somewhere. I got best results by making a porridge & grinding a little powder into a small amount of oats and then mixing it all together while still hot.

As for actual pigments, I had a little success with some iron oxide pigments, and with Chrome Green, both in porridge and in watercolour medium. These would get picked up and run off with, though not very far, not sure how much it really liked it:

But I wasn't being very scientific about it so who knows.

Would be interested to see what it makes of anthocyanins? & betaines too - good luck

[SHENG Huanjie]

I have read it in Andrew Adamatzky's book, but he mainly focused on the decision making of slime moulds in the front of multiple food sources being colored with different pigments.  From the figures in this book, it seems that slime moulds picked up some pigmentation.