What foods have you found slime molds to like?

[superuser]

I'm wanting to just maybe make an internet master list of what foods you've found these plasmodiums to like, and what they didn't like so much

I'm doing this in part with maybe some experimenting to find food sources that really ramp them up speed wise and getting an early list of what works/doesn't work can save me some time

So far I've only done the old-fashioned old fashioned oats and also tried whole oats which they didn't care for so much but they weren't fully cooked

[Sarah Roberts]

Hi,for P. polycephalum I found that if I boil up whole oats briefly (about 10-20 seconds is enough) and let this cool was the favourite, maybe because they absorb a little more water in the process? Tesco cheap and cheerful oats and Waitrose organic were preferred in my house.

To give your plasmodium a treat get some valerian root, herbalists sell it dried. Also useful for helping to encourage an escaped plasmodium to go somewhere safe, leave a trail that it can follow.

I suppose the optimal food/ substrate is a nice damp rotting log but I wouldn't know the best kind of tree... because we just buy the same clones from Carolina we're a bit removed from that - it would be good to know what substrate people find the wild type on.

[superuser]

Very true about the rotting wood being optimal, it made me think of another thought. 

In mycology its pretty known that if you forage a wild, say, oyster mushroom, plate it and grow it out yourself, 9/10 times it is insanely aggressive.  Wayyy more fast and aggressive growing than a commercial strain you can buy online im sure obviously due to the human cultivation interference, I bet slimes could be the same.

One theory for why that is is because in the wild, lets say for a stupidly arbitrary example, say an oyster mushroom has X number of genes for eating all kinds of different wild woods.  As it grows and sporulates and grows on all kinds of different logs it has to keep those genes and it knows how to do it best throughout the millennia.  But human cultivation comes in, parts it out an indefinite number of times, grows it only on oats, etc, its just weaker overall after 'losing' knowledge and one way theorized to make your mushroom flushes stronger is to grow it out on different grains/substrate each time if you can so it learns more tricks up it's sleeve overall

sorta tangential but slime molds could very well behave similarly