Intro to the slime mold:

The slime mold official name is: Physarym Polycephalum (PP). The PP is an amoeba. An amoeba does not have a clear cell wall so one could say that it consists of one large cell. The PP searches for its food (primarily starch based food like decaying wood) through growing ‘tentacles’. Once it has found a food source the ‘tentacle’ that did not find any food retract. Between the food sources a ‘tentacle’ remains. The PP pulsates at a speed of 1:90 seconds. This allows the PP to ‘communicate’ and transport its food through its ‘tentacles’. If it’s too dry and there is too much light, the PP retract and will create spores. These can survive for many years.

TED talk on slime molds: www…

Getting the slime mold:

We asked around and there where a couple of sources where we could get the slime molds. - One was through the biohacker Maurizio, who has some slime mold in its cartrocatic state on paper. It had been inactive for over a year, however slime molds in this state could easily stay in this state for such a period. We where very happy that Maurizio agreed to share some of his slime molds with us. - Another source we tried was Artis (microbia) lizalogalama@gmail.com. Unfortunately we where not able to get some slime molds from them. - We also emailed maritmihklepp@gmail.com as he might be able to get us some slime molds as well. However he did not have any left. - We searched the internet and found that the main site to get the slime molds was through www.Carlolina.. Elaine, another biohacker student had ordered here and we agreed that we would share our slime molds which ever we would get first.

Why we got interested:

We think the slime mold is a very interesting creature as its ..

Working with slime mold’s:

We started with building a large incubator oven. From styroform we build a large box with a lid on top, viewing windows on top and a location for a GoPro. We also bought a heating plate an Arduino, a relais and a temperature sensor.

As we did not had any slime molds in the beginning we decided to start growing some fungus from French chees. We got some Gorgonzola, Brie, Foume de Ambert. We prepared some pretri dishes with 2% agar and ….%. And placed in our large incubator. After a week we came back and saw a bit of growth. (we are sorry for the chees smell ;) A week later we returned again and then most pretri dishes where covered with bread fungus. Which rendered them unusable, so we decided to throw them away.

That week we got some slime molds from Maurizio in its sclerotium phase on some paper. We prepared some sterile pretri dishes with 2% agar and ….%. Here we placed small pieces of paper with the slime mold on. And we added some oatmeal flakes. We placed these pretri dishes in an incubator at 22C. After a week we came back. We saw that some brown ‘fatty’ stuff had grown and that there what some other fungus growing. We threw away one of the pretri dishes that had too much fungus and decided to add some water to one of the pretri dishes and leave the other pretri dish as it was. And we placed it back in the incubator. A week later again both pretri dishes where full of fungus, however the brown ‘fatty’ substance had also grown. We where uncertain if this was slime mold as in all the documentation is was much more yellow. And we could not see any of the tentacles. We where thinking of what we where doing wrong. In the literature it also said that it would grow on filter paper as long as it was wet enough. We decided to try this route and prepare some more petri dishes but without the agar base but with a filter base. We put a large filter over a petri dish so the sides would touch the ground of the box where we had put the petri dishes in. Then we added some pieces of the paper with the slime mold. We had read that slime mold also like fatty substances. So we decided to use oatmeal flakes in some of the pretri dishes and young cheese in some other pretri dishes. We had also read that the slime mold does not like salt. We where searching how we could make the barriers for the race track. We decided to try out Paradontax which is a salty toothpaste. And see if the slime mold would not grow towards/over the Paradontax. Then we added water in the box. The filter paper would absorb the water into the petri dish. As the water would evaporate quickly we took the box to our house. Here we regularly added water and oatmeal flakes. The preti dishes with the pieces of paper with slime mold where now much wetter than before. After 1-2 days we saw some yellow coloring. So we where hopeful that we would see some slime mold action this time. After a week the yellow coloring was still there but we could not see any real slime mold action. The tooth paste had been running and some of the salt had leaked out into the water. After another week nothing happed again and we decided to stop this experiment as well.

We then received some active slime mold from Eline (another biohacker) who had ordered it from Carolina. We received six petri dishes with oatmeal flakes covered in slime mold (YES finally we got some yellow stuff).

The slime mold race track:

Our initial idea was to create a large race track for the slime molds where two (types) slime molds would need to compete against each other on a race track or an obstacle track. While we originally had planned to use the large incubator

We did not want to create a maze, as this experiment has been done for many times already. Our focus is speed.