Jan-Maarten Luursema's Blog – July 2017 Archive (2)

When I started to work with P. Polycephalum I build an elevated, acrylate enclosure that allowed me to slip pieces of paper underneath to help me create designs of oatmeal, along the lines of the famous Tokyo subway experiment. It looked like this:

Below…

To curb Physarum Polycephalum's (for convenience known as Andi in our household) tendency to wander, I have used a 'moat', a ring of high-salt agar around its standard agar living area. This works fine, only is somewhat labor intensive to maintain and also harms Andi, who keeps burning itself trying to go where no slime mold went before.



I experimented with four alternative substrates to replace the salty agar: 1. felt, thinking this would interfere with its creeping motion; 2.…