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I spent a year of college teaching rats to find their way through a maze, and now I find that slime molds, which don’t even have brains, can do the same thing! Professor Toshiyuki Nakagaki of Japan’s Future University Hakodate studies slime molds, which organize their colonies of cells to move toward a food source, using the most direct route.
“Humans are not the only living things with information-processing abilities,” he said. “Simple creatures can solve certain kinds of difficult puzzles. If you want to spotlight the essence of life or intelligence, it’s easier to use these simple creatures.”
The research in slime mold organization may lead to information-processing breakthroughs, including the possibility of biocomputers. Link -via Arbroath
(Image credit: Flickr user Sentrawoods)
How much do you know about slime molds? These one-celled creatures live in our forests, but are so different from species we normally encounter that they seem almost extraterrestrial.
Slime molds are a remarkable lineage of amoebas that live in soil. While they spend part of their life as ordinary single-celled creatures, they sometimes grow into truly alien forms. Some species gather by the thousands to form multicellular bodies that can crawl. Others develop into gigantic, pulsating networks of protoplasm.
While naturalists have known of slime molds for centuries, only now are scientists really starting to understand them. Lab experiments are revealing the complex choreography of signals in some species that allows 20,000 individuals to form a single sluglike body.
Not only do they clump together, but they exhibit what might pass for a single-cell-type of intelligence. In order to act as one body, the individuals will connect, move, and even sacrifice their lives for the benefit of the colony. Carl Zimmer gives us some fascinating insight into what slime molds can do at the New York Times. Link -via The Loom
(Image credit: Flickr user myriorama)
The amoeba species Dictyostelium discoideum slime mold (or dicty, as scientists lovingly call it) is one fascinating organism. For instance, its life cycle involves unicellular amoeba, then a multicellular slug that scoots around to find food, then a "fruiting body" to disperse spores to new growing areas.
Scientists have just discovered that the slime mold is even cannier than previously thought: it can also "farm."
Research described in Nature shows that a third of these spores contain some of the bacteria to grow at the new site.
Food management has been seen in animals including ants and snails, but never in creatures as simple as these.
The behaviour falls short of the kind of "farming" that more advanced animals do; ants, for example, nurture a single fungus species that no longer exists in the wild.
But the idea that an amoeba that spends much of its life as a single-celled organism could hold short of consuming a food supply before decamping is an astonishing one.
More than just a snack for the journey of dispersal, the idea is that the bacteria that travel with the spores can "seed" a new bacterial colony, and thus a food source in case the new locale should be lacking in bacteria.
No, it’s not just a weird work of art, but a demonstration by two scientists about how a slime mold can be used to plan road and communications networks efficiently:
Physarum polycephalum, a type of slime mold, grows tendrils in search of food and withdraws extraneous arms to focus on the most efficient paths between sources. Although the American map is just an illustrative model made for Popular Science, researchers in the U.K. have used slime mold to create similar replicas of local roads and railways, backed up by computer models. Andy Adamatzky and Jeff Jones, specialists in unconventional computing at the University of the West of England in Bristol, found that, left to its own devices, the slime mold mimicked a good part of the country’s actual road systems. Because slime mold finds the paths that are most resilient to faults or damage, it could be used to make mobile-communication and transportation networks hardier.
Videos at the link.
Link | Photo: Andy Adamatzky and Jeff Jones
Watch slime molds and mushrooms grow in this time-lapse video. I was particularly taken with the Stinkhorn Mushroom, which casts a net! Link
