Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/10/17/paris-zoo-opens-a-new-exhibit.html
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This makes me think of As She Climbed Across the Table by Jonathan Lethem.
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Slime mold has been used to quickly model more efficient routes for trains and roads, but they’re used for other interesting research
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I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that there’s nothing in this organism that future science would define as a brain either. Or past science. No science has ever or will ever say that slime molds have brains.
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So, define “brain”, Mr. Brainiac. 
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I have a green blob of what I think is a cyanobacteria - aka star jelly, aka troll’s butter. Possibly a nostoc. I put some in some petri dishes with googlie eyes. Anyone want one? Get your very own blobby.
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Not saying that this is the case here, but similar experiments on biochemical memory with planaria were found to be be the result of dirty glassware, where later generations of flatworms were just following trails left by previous generations.
Instead I think it’s equally as interesting if coordinated or “learned” behavior is not the result of a single brain, but rather from the laws of large numbers. For example ant or bee colonies aren’t really controlled by any governing force (i.e. the queen doesn’t really control the hive, she’s more of just the hive’s ovary), and all the cool stuff a hive does is the result of the combined impulses of all its members. The same is likely true of superorganisms like slime molds or even societies.
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Brains are organs, and slime molds don’t have organs*. I highly doubt that brains will be declassified as organs, so I don’t believe that slime molds will ever be said to have brains, despite the complex behaviors they can exhibit.
*Though there probably is some slime mold somewhere living within a Hammond B3
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Pffft. Don’t know what’s so special about this one. I’ve got a ton of them living in the back of my fridge.
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It’s all fun and games until the slime monster shows up
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Sounds like it would make an excellent President.
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Slime molds are fucking wild. They don’t fit in a lot of the neat familiar categories of things. Like “cells” - a bunch of genetically distinct “individual” slime molds can join together and still be a single, giant cell (with multiple nuclei), technically. Then they can split apart. They can “learn,” which challenges the whole notion of “learning” as it is technically premised on an organism that has multiple cells, a nervous system, etc. (none of which a slime mold has). A slime mold collective can learn something, split apart, some of those “individuals” can join a different collective and the new collective will know the thing the previous one learned. Taxonomically, no one knew what to do with them for the longest time. They’re weird.
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I believe that’s 720 different sexes, not sex organs. Also, 720 is suspiciously 6 factorial which makes me think that they actually have 6 sex genes (or whatever) and that order somehow matters.
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So it’s an oddly coloued amorphous mass with no brain, 720 different sexes, and incredibly strong opinions on food.
Isn’t that just a real-life version of Tumblr?
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That’s not an early record, P. polycephalum was being grown in labs by 1930.
I’ve grown some of these- I asked a researcher for a sample, and was sent a piece of paper with what looked like a large scab stuck to it. After adding water and oats, it turned into the streaming form.
My favourite slime mould has to be the ‘Dog vomit slime mould’, though.
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