Maurizio Montalti has put the result online of three weeks of time-lapse recordings of a slime mold. It is remarkable to see the behaviour of this peculiar organism. The video is a result of the BioLogic workshop held at the Waag in January of this year.
The video has an interval of 5 minutes between each frame.
BioLogic | Living structures and Swarm bodies from Officina Corpuscoli on Vimeo.
What is happening here is a slime mold continously looking for new sources of nourishment, probing its environment through channels in random directions. Only the channels that provide the fastest route between two points of nutrition will normally be kept alive.
The patterns of nutritional points have been printed with a converted 3D-printer, as a kind of challenge or puzzle for the slime mold. With software, predictions of the slime mold's behaviour were made. It is not yet clear whether the results are in line with the simulations.
It is known that hundreds of slime mold cells can merge to work as one entity. From the video, you could almost conclude that they prefer to travel along the edges of the dishes!
