• Pour plates suitable for slime mold cultures.
• Subculture slime mold
• Sketch/draw a pattern of oatmeal/slime mold, predict how the growth will occur. Inspiration. Slime Mold Tokyo Train Map. [↗︎]
• Compare your predicitions and your growth
• Why is the scientific name Physarum polycephalum? (= many heads)
• Extra Credit: What other ways are there to grow slime mold? Wet paper towel?Tupperware? Experiment.
• Extra-extra Credit: Make a time-lapse movie of growing slime mold.

The culture medium was prepared based on the blog of the Minakata Kumagusu Museum.

recipe:

• water 300 ml
• agar 3.0 g
  This time, I used edible agar-agar sold in supermarkets.

prediction
▼2022/07/20 19:36


I predicted that they move in a zigzag as indicated by the arrows in the figure.

result
▼2022/07/23 13:50


They moved along the edges of the petri dish rather than zigzagging.

• Why is the scientific name Physarum polycephalum? (= many heads)
  Wikipedia says the following.
  When exposed to light, the starving plasmodium differentiates irreversibly into sporangia that are distinguished from other Physarum species by their multiple heads (hence polycephalum).
  So, the simple answer is that the fruiting body of plasmodium looks like a head, but I think the name may also come from the fact that despite being a single-celled organism, it behaves like a group with intelligence.