#slimelapsegallery

[theswarmlab-blog]

#SlimeLapseGallery – Episode 5 - Slime mould in its natural habitat

If you’ve ever watched a slime mold move, you have more patience (and spare time) than I do. If you prefer ‘real action’ over ‘real time’, then #SlimeLapseGallery is the place for you. Brought to you weekly on the SwarmLab’s website, see all the best timelapse videos of slime mold, from the web and from our lab.

This week’s #SlimeLapse video shows a slime mold – probably the ‘dog vomit’ slime mold, Fuligo septica – moving up a log from the forest floor over 5 hours. The pulsating behavior that you see is not respiration, but the consequence of the oscillations occurring within the slime mold that drive locomotion and decision-making, as well as distributing cytoplasm, nutrients and wastes.

Yellow Slime Mold Timelapse from sesotek on Vimeo.

[theswarmlab-blog]

#SlimeLapseGallery – Episode 4 – The collective slug

If you’ve ever watched a slime mold move, you have more patience (and spare time) than I do. If you prefer ‘real action’ over ‘real time’, then #SlimeLapseGallery is the place for you. Brought to you weekly on the SwarmLab’s website, see all the best timelapse videos of slime mold, from the web and from our lab.

The SwarmLab’s slime mold of choice is the acellular (or plasmodial) slime mold Physarum polycephalum. The ‘acellular’ indicates that this slime mold is a single cell, and the macroscopic creature you see is not composed of lots of tiny cells like a regular multicellular organism. There are other slime molds however that are called ‘cellular’ slime molds, the most famous of which is Dictyostelium discoideum. When conditions are right for sporulation, swarms of tiny D. discoideum cells come together to form a ‘slug’, which undulates it’s way to an exposed area to maximize spore dispersion. The cells maintain their individual cell membranes and never fuse, meaning the slug moves by the collective coordination of many unrelated individual cells. Once in position, the slug transforms itself into a base, a stalk and a sporulating cap, with only the cells in the cap gaining the benefit of reproduction. Princeton Emeritus Professor John Bonner championed the study of cellular slime mold to increase our understanding of evolution and development, and is the creator of the beautiful time-lapse videos featured in this week’s #SlimeLapseGallery.

[theswarmlab-blog]

#SlimeLapseGallery – Episode 3 - The inner life of the slime mold

If you’ve ever watched a slime mold move, you have more patience (and spare time) than I do. If you prefer ‘real action’ over ‘real time’, then #SlimeLapseGallery is the place for you. Brought to you weekly on the SwarmLab’s website, see all the best timelapse videos of slime mold, from the web and from our lab.

This week’s #SlimeLapseGallery features a recent compilation of Physarum timelapse microscopy that I hadn’t seen before, highlighting several features of slime mold behavior, as well as the beauty of the organism itself. The vegetative state of Physarum polycephalum (known as a plasmodium) is composed of many smaller oscillating units. Each unit oscillates at a frequency dependent upon both the local environment and its interactions with neighboring oscillators. When the slime mold senses attractants such as food, the oscillation frequency in the area closest to the food increases, causing cytoplasm to flow toward the attractant. The opposite is true of repellents. The collective behavior of the oscillators, each passing on information to entrain its neighbors, drives the organism’s locomotion, and allows the slime mold to be modeled as a coupled-oscillator system. This video by Anna Sagatov highlights the oscillation pattern of the slime mold, especially where you can see the organism has ingested fluorescent-labelled beads that zip around in the cytoplasm, allowing us to visualize the back-and-forth flow of information and nutrients within the organism.

Physarum polycephalum from Anna Sagatov on Vimeo.

[theswarmlab-blog]

#SlimeLapseGallery - Episode 2 - Outsmarting engineers since 2010.

If you’ve ever watched a slime mold move, you have more patience (and spare time) than I do. If you prefer ‘real action’ over ‘real time’, then #SlimeLapseGallery is the place for you. Brought to you weekly on the SwarmLab’s website, see all the best timelapse videos of slime mold, from the web and from our lab.

This week’s #SlimeLapseGallery entry continues with another brilliant experiment from Toshi’s lab, this time the brainchild of Atsushi Tero, culminating in an excellent Science paper. A sheet of agar (acting as a moist substrate only) was cut to resemble the coastline of Japan, in the Tokyo region. Oat flakes acting as food sources were placed on the agar surface, at the locations of the major railway stations in Tokyo, and a large amount of slime mould placed at Tokyo Central. As the organism spread out in search of food and contacted the ‘rail stations’, it connected them with a tubule network. The researchers then used fancy network analysis to prove that the slime mould, without a brain or even a single neuron, can build transport networks that are just as efficient as those designed by human engineers. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this paper nabbed Toshi his second IgNobel prize. Since this landmark paper, there have been many ‘researchers’ jumping on the bandwagon, claiming that slime mould can design better highways everywhere from Iberia to Australia, but the original is by far the best.

[theswarmlab-blog]

#SlimeLapseGallery - Episode 1 - A maze-ing slime mold

If you’ve ever watched a slime mold move, you have more patience (and spare time) than I do. If you prefer ‘real action’ over ‘real time’, then #SlimeLapseGallery is the place for you. Brought to you weekly on the SwarmLab’s website, see all the best timelapse videos of slime mold, from the web and from our lab.

To start with a classic, we can’t go past this video from Toshiyuki Nakagaki’s lab and ground-breaking Nature paper of 2000. In the setup, a labyrinth maze is installed on an agar substrate by cutting the maze ‘walls’ from overhead transparency sheets. The plastic surface is dry and hence repellent to the slime mold. The slime is then made to grow throughout the entire maze surface by placing small blobs of biomass around the maze and letting them fuse. At this stage, oat-flake food sources are placed at the entry and exit to the maze, and the slime mold – which is now a single cell spanning the entire maze – seeks to engulf both food sources, while staying connected. The most efficient way to do this is to retract excess biomass from dead-ends and longer paths through the maze, eventually resulting in a single tubule which runs along only the shortest path solution. Amazing stuff for a single cell without a brain or even 2 neurons to rub together. The work won Toshi an IgNobel prize, and has inspired a new generation of slime mold ethologists. Toshi runs a lab at Hakodate’s Future University, and is a great guy to knock back a few Sake’s with.