scrambled egg slime

Last week my husband Jamie and I walked through the little nature preserve on Lake Drive in Shorewood. I wanted to show him how when you start to look for them, mushrooms are everywhere. But they weren't. We walked and looked, looked and looked. Didn't see a single one. But then he called me over to a decaying tree stump with yellow stuff seemingly smeared all over it. A slime mold. There was also a very active red ant colony living in the stump, and we watched them, hard at work, doing what ants do, or at least what the worker ants do--carrying incredible large and heavy things relative to their size, making it look like nothing. (Ever notice you never see an ant put down a load for to rest?) But we noticed that they were avoiding the yellow stuff, going around it. When I got home, I found a picture of what we had seen in a book I checked out at Shorewood library, with its common or folk name: scrambled egg slime. Slime, I discovered, is a fungus form that has motility, which is to say that it can move. It gets even weirder: I looked it up on Wikipedia, and found that it is smart too. This is from the Wikipedia entry on it:

A team of Japanese and Hungarian researchers, writing in the journal Nature^[1], claimed to have found the slime mold Physarum polycephalum is capable of finding the shortest way through a maze. Pieces of the slime mould were enticed through a 30-square-centimetre (five-square-inch) maze by the prospect of food at the end of the puzzle. The researchers concluded that the creature was exhibiting a kind of primitive intelligence.

Normally, the slime spreads out its network of tube-like legs, or pseudopodia, to fill all the available space. But when two pieces of food were placed at separate exit points in the labyrinth, the organism squeezed its entire body between the two nutrients. It adopted the shortest possible route, effectively solving the puzzle.

I'm going to check out this article. It's all a bit much for a Monday.

This video of the slime making its way through the maze is included as supplementary material to the article. Could use musical accompaniment.