An international network of/for intelligent organisms

My slime mold experiment...

Hi everyone,

So I'm growing my slime mold, Physarum polycephalum in a agar petri dish. I have three petri plates with a slime mold and some oak flakes. Plate 1 is my control, plate 2 has an average amount of oat flakes, plate 3 has a lot of oat flakes. I wanted to see how the slime molds would react to the different levels of oat flakes. I recorded my results, and it seem to me that the slime mold responded more to the petri plate that had the least oat flakes. It also grew more with the petri plate that had the least oat flakes. WHY is this? I thought that the slime mold would grow more with the petri plate that had alot of oat flakes. Someone make sense of this for me! I'm so confuse.

0 members like this

▶ Reply to This

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Heather Barnett on March 15, 2011 at 9:23

Hi Stella, It grows best when in search of food and moisture, when it finds it there's no need to send out a search party, so it settles down to consume the oats. I like to think of physarum as both an intrepid explorer and a couch potato. When it finds a large food source it will stay for days chomping away, fuelling up for its next expedition! Your results are true to form, don't over-feed it if you want it to perform interesting growth patterns, but don't starve it or it'll run out of energy. :)