In this section, we tried to cultivate slime mold.

About Slime Mold

From the document of CARILINA Physarum Manual:

• Slime Molds possess characteristics that cross typical taxonomic boundaries -> That’s because classification of Physarum polycephalum has long challenged scientists.
• Physarum is an intriguining organism that can be used to introduce, discuss, or reinforce many subjects, including life cycles, mitosis, meiosis, sexual and asexual reproduction, cytoplasmic streaming, chemotaxis,,,, and developmental biology.
• Most interesting point I found from the document is… about its sexual production.

And, I found the interesting feature of slime mold on YouTube. Slime mold navigate the quickest route througn a maze to get it sme food…

So, we tried to experiment it.

Procedure

The slime mold came from America。

First, we sketched how does the slime mold move and draw the route to some foods. The left one is drawing the pathway of Tokyo Metro Hanzomon Line. The right one is drawing just I interested whether the slime mold could move among foods in expected orders.

We use a pure agar medium to cultivate the slime mold.

We put agar into the petri dish…. It have to be worked in the clean bench. Then, waiting a couple of hours to solidify the agar medium.

We use a oatmeals as a foods of slime mold.

We put a oatmeals and slime mold into the augar medium.

The important thing is to sterillize tweezers by spirit lamp.

I put the slime mold and foods just like draw shetch.

Then, we put Slime mold in the incubator. The incubator should keep dark, so we sticked the cartboard on the door glass to cut the light. And, to keep inside wet, set the temperature around 25 celcius degree.

Inside of the incubator is here:

Then waiting the few days for growing the slime mold.

After a few days….

After a few days, we checked how slime mold grow and move around.

Checking on the stage light.

Compareing with the sketches.

Here is a Hanzomo Line Sketch and real navigation of slime mold. Slime mold have not grew up yet….

I made two slime mold for the 2nd sketch. The slime mold didn’t move around in expected order. Moreover, tt is interesting that the one grew well up, another have not absolutely grew up yet… What is the difference among them….

In addition, one of other student’s slime mold grew too much, then they tried to break outside… Really interesting why should be so different nevertheless the conditions of each slime molds (medium, environments) are the same…

Finally

I learned about the features of Slime mold through the document and the experiment both. It was the first time for me to grew up Slime mold and I thought it could be used for many fun things of Bio-Hacking. In the future, I would make my own bio-hack environment (making incubator) and grew up slime mold in my home…