Who Knew Slime Molds Were So Smart?

If you have been in North Carolina in the summer time, you have seen it. The big yellow patch that appears on the mulch bed in your yard a couple of days after the rain. It looks like. . . well, dog vomit. Eeeeew!

This is slime mold, officially named Physarum polycephalum. However, slime mold is not truly a mold, as it is not classified as a fungi. Although slime molds may not be fungi, they are apparently smart. Check out this article from The New York Times:


Slime Mold Proves to be a Brainy Blob
THE NEW YORK TIMES

Let's hear it for slime molds. Researchers in Japan have shown that a slime mold can design a network that is as efficient as the Tokyo rail system. Furthermore, the slime mold can build its network in a day.

A slime mold is what scientists call a single-celled amoeboid organism. When foraging for food, it spreads out as an amorphous mass, then builds tubular connections between food sources. This is a smart blob.

"We've found an unexpected high ability of information processing in this organism," said Toshiyuki Nakagaki, a researcher at Hokkaido University. "I wanted to pose a complicated problem to this slime mold, to design a large network," Nakagaki said. "This kind of program is not so easy, even for humans."

So he and his colleagues set up an experiment where they laid out 36 bits of food in a pattern corresponding to cities in the Tokyo area and put a slime mold, Physarum polycephalum, at the spot corresponding to Tokyo.

As they report in Science, after 26 hours the slime mold had created a series of tubular connections that matched, to a great extent, the rail links among these cities. The researchers found that the slime mold network was as efficient as the rail network, it tolerated breaks in the connections just as well, and it was created at a reasonable cost to the organism.


26 hours and at a reasonable cost?? I think we have just identified the perfect contractor to design the Southeast High Speed Rail Corridor from Charlotte to Washington DC!


Air Matters LLC has performed mold testing services in the Raleigh NC area since 2002. The owner, Renee D. Ward, has over 22 years of safety and environmental experience and holds both her Bachelors and Masters degrees in engineering. Renee is also a member of the American Industrial Hygiene Association and the American Indoor Air Quality Council. You may contact Air Matters at (919) 961-2221 or info@AirMattersMoldTesting.com.