Amazing slime

I just got a new pet last week: a plasmodium of Physarum polycephalum. Physarum is one of the more commonly grown of the poorly named "slime molds". These creatures are slimy, but can be quite beautiful under the right conditions. The are also not fungi, but giant multinucleate amoebae with complex life cycles (the plasmodium is the multinucleate stage). I took the time lapse movie above while the plasmodium (bright yellow) grew over an oat on its petri dish. The black stuff was sumi ink that I was hoping it would ingest so I could more easily see the flow through the plasmodium... It didn't, at least not in the time I gave it.

Slime molds are fascinating for lots of reasons, but my personal interest is two fold. First, I'm trying to get a science collaboration wiki started, and these organisms seem like something that can allow anyone to do cell biology: they can be grown at home and people can see them and do cell biology without much equipment. Second, the way they self-organize their transport network based on functional/flow cues fascinates me because of the parallels with other organisms (such as colonial bryozoans, and multicellular human circulatory system; see discussion in previous previous post).