Slime Mold - Tumblr Posts
★Jashtober + Fungustober day 6, nerd + carnival candy★
first day of fungustober!
ive decided that im gonna make a bunch of dnd monsters out of these fungi
(if you wanna do fungustober, the prompt list is on my page!)
Our Galaxy is Caught Up in a Giant Cosmic Cobweb! 🕸️
If we could zoom waaaay out, we would see that galaxies and galaxy clusters make up large, fuzzy threads, like the strands of a giant cobweb. But we'll work our way out to that. First let's start at home and look at our planet's different cosmic communities.
Our home star system
Earth is one of eight planets — Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune — that orbit the Sun. But our solar system is more than just planets; it also has a lot of smaller objects.
An asteroid belt circles the Sun between Mars and Jupiter. Beyond Neptune is a doughnut-shaped region of icy objects called the Kuiper Belt. This is where dwarf planets like Pluto and Makemake are found and is likely the source of short-period comets (like Haley’s comet), which orbit the Sun in less than 200 years.
Scientists think that even farther out lies the Oort Cloud, also a likely source of comets. This most distant region of our solar system is a giant spherical shell storing additional icy space debris the size of mountains, or larger! The outer edge of the Oort Cloud extends to about 1.5 light-years from the Sun — that’s the distance light travels in a year and a half (over 9 trillion miles).
Sometimes asteroids or comets get ejected from these regions and end up sharing an orbit with planets like Jupiter or even crossing Earth’s orbit. There are even interstellar objects that have entered the inner solar system from even farther than the Oort Cloud, perhaps coming all the way from another star!
Our home galaxy
Let's zoom out to look at the whole Milky Way galaxy, which contains more than 100 billion stars. Many are found in the galaxy’s disk — the pancake-shaped part of a spiral galaxy where the spiral arms lie. The brightest and most massive stars are found in the spiral arms, close to their birth places. Dimmer, less massive stars can be found sprinkled throughout the disk. Also found throughout the spiral arms are dense clouds of gas and dust called nebulae. The Sun lies in a small spiral arm called the Orion Spur.
The Milky Way’s disk is embedded in a spherical “halo” about 120,000 light-years across. The halo is dotted with globular clusters of old stars and filled with dark matter. Dark matter doesn’t emit enough light for us to directly detect it, but we know it’s there because without its mass our galaxy doesn’t have enough gravity to hold together!
Our galaxy also has several orbiting companion galaxies ranging from about 25,000 to 1.4 million light-years away. The best known of these are the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, which are visible to the unaided eye from Earth’s Southern Hemisphere.
Our galactic neighborhood
The Milky Way and Andromeda, our nearest neighboring spiral galaxy, are just two members of a small group of galaxies called the Local Group. They and the other members of the group, 50 to 80 smaller galaxies, spread across about 10 million light-years.
The Local Group lies at the outskirts of an even larger structure. It is just one of at least 100 groups and clusters of galaxies that make up the Virgo Supercluster. This cluster of clusters spans about 110 million light-years!
Galaxies aren’t the only thing found in a galaxy cluster, though. We also find hot gas, as shown above in the bright X-ray light (in pink) that surrounds the galaxies (in optical light) of cluster Abell 1413, which is a picturesque member of a different supercluster. Plus, there is dark matter throughout the cluster that is only detectable through its gravitational interactions with other objects.
The Cosmic Web
The Virgo Supercluster is just one of many, many other groups of galaxies. But the universe’s structure is more than just galaxies, clusters, and the stuff contained within them.
For more than two decades, astronomers have been mapping out the locations of galaxies, revealing a filamentary, web-like structure. This large-scale backbone of the cosmos consists of dark matter laced with gas. Galaxies and clusters form along this structure, and there are large voids in between.
The scientific visualizations of this “cosmic web” look a little like a spider web, but that would be one colossal spider! <shudder>
And there you have the different communities that define Earth’s place in the universe. Our tiny planet is a small speck on a crumb of that giant cosmic web!
Want to learn even more about the structures in the universe? Check out our Cosmic Distance Scale!
Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space.
Society won't let me be goop.
I just wanna be a slimy little man.
A goofy gooper if you will.
A sticky Sam.
A schlorp shlongle.
Elaeomyxa Cerifera, first identified in 1942. This slime mold sporophores split open to release spores which sparkle like a disco ball. It looks like a whole Galaxy in a single mushroom.
Photos: John Robinson
Slime Molds and Intelligence
Okay, despite going into a biology related field, I only just learned about slime molds, and hang on, because it gets WILD.
This guy in the picture is called Physarum polycephalum, one of the more commonly studied types of slime mold. It was originally thought to be a fungus, though we now know it to actually be a type of protist (a sort of catch-all group for any eukaryotic organism that isn't a plant, animal, or a fungus). As protists go, it's pretty smart. It is very good at finding the most efficient way to get to a food source, or multiple food sources. In fact, placing a slime mold on a map with food sources at all of the major cities can give a pretty good idea of an efficient transportation system. Here is a slime mold growing over a map of Tokyo compared to the actual Tokyo railway system:
Pretty good, right? Though they don't have eyes, ears, or noses, the slime molds are able to sense objects at a distance kind of like a spider using tiny differences in tension and vibrations to sense a fly caught in its web. Instead of a spiderweb, though, this organism relies on proteins called TRP channels. The slime mold can then make decisions about where it wants to grow. In one experiment, a slime mold was put in a petri dish with one glass disk on one side and 3 glass disks on the other side. Even though the disks weren't a food source, the slime mold chose to grow towards and investigate the side with 3 disks over 70% of the time.
Even more impressive is that these organisms have some sense of time. If you blow cold air on them every hour on the hour, they'll start to shrink away in anticipation when before the air hits after only 3 hours.
Now, I hear you say, this is cool and all, but like, I can do all those things too. The slime mold isn't special...
To which I would like to point out that you have a significant advantage over the slime mold, seeing as you have a brain.
Yeah, these protists can accomplish all of the things I just talked about, and they just... don't have any sort of neural architecture whatsoever? They don't even have brain cells, let alone the structures that should allow them to process sensory information and make decisions because of it. Nothing that should give them a sense of time. Scientists literally have no idea how this thing is able to "think'. But however it does, it is sure to be a form of cognition that is completely and utterly different from anything that we're familiar with.
Green on green on green
![tweet by e. @MelytraMithra reading "oh my goddddd
researchers built a smartwatch heart beat monitor that uses a slime mold for its operation. the slime mold has to be fed and cared for, so the users in the trial... developed an emotional attachment to it [two sobbing emojis]"
The Tweet includes a screenshot from the paper, described in next image](https://64.media.tumblr.com/8ab8afb58f8e4e3dd8ec16260b8f134c/0d383fad182fe32e-17/s500x750/151c286f28b73bfac14823d02914fb1076331935.png)
I can't handle how cute this is. i want a slime pet too
Link to the Tweets. And here's a link to the study. ID in alt text and below the readmore.
Image 1:
tweet by e. @MelytraMithra reading "oh my goddddd
researchers built a smartwatch heart beat monitor that uses a slime mold for its operation. the slime mold has to be fed and cared for, so the users in the trial… developed an emotional attachment to it [two sobbing emojis]"
The Tweet includes a screenshot from the paper, described in next image.
Image 2:
The tweet's screenshot, which reads:
Developing a connection.
All participants expressed various feelings of connection with our device. P1, P2, P4, and P5 all described it as a little friend and/or pet. P2 expressed, “it’s always good to be accompanied by some living creature, I really like different, animals or plants. (. . .) carrying this little friend also made me feel happy and peaceful”. P4 noted that she would be reminded by the slime mold’s presence by its smell, even stating that it felt endearing, “my cat’s kind of have a smell, dogs have a smell, the physarum, I recognize the smell and it smells kind of, organic, it’s kind of yeasty but not like decaying, it smells alive”. In recalling an experience where she had to take a long drive, P4 explained, “oh, I gotta bring my little pet mold friend, during the drive, I was also thinking about how I used to be really into Tamagotchis (. . .) with the physarum, (. . .) it has this smell to it which your Tamagotchis don’t have, it has a sense of physicality, (. . .) they’re definitely different”. P1 stated that their personal care routine ended up linked to the device’s care routine “I think every time I fed myself is when I would remember to at least check it, I think that was actually quite linked”. While she was sick, P5’s partner helped take care of her as well as helped to take care of her device. P5 recounts, “I was taking care of the slime and feeding it oats and stuff, my partner was also feeding me oatmeal because I was sick and so she was like you’re my little slime and I was like yeah, I am (. . .) then she started calling me her slime because I mean me and the slime, like, we were eating the same stuff, (. . .) we were both being fed and watered”. P2 & P4 also stated that the visual appearance of their device affected their mood. P2 explained that growth made them feel refreshed. P4 associated the bright yellow of the physarum with happy feelings, noting this affective quality several times in her diary entries and in her interview.
Image 3: A reply tweet from the original tweeter reading "well nourished. in my lane. lively. growing." There's a photoset from the study described as "a slime mold oscillating between living and dormant stages." There are four images of the slime mold, which is a yellow color. The first shows it "dried / dormant / not growing." Second shows it "water added / resuscitated / growing." Third shows the slime "well nourished / lively / growing." The fourth shows it once again "dried / dormant / not growing."
motivating myself to write my paper about fungi by talking about fungi:
in Tokyo in 2010, scientists wanted to test the limits of 'brainless' organisms, especially their decision making skills, so they made a little obstacle course in a Petri dish and sent a slime mold to navigate it. they set it up with light and oats, the oats acting as goals and the lights acting as deterrents. the oats were placed in such a way that represented the major train stations in Tokyo. in LESS THAN TWO DAYS, the slime mold had perfectly navigated the obstacle course and hit all the oat stations. when the scientists compared the Petri dish patterns to the city, they noticed that the slime mold had perfectly replicated the train lines of Tokyo. in the most efficient way possible. a task which took humans FIVE YEARS to plan, design and build. slime molds do not have nervous systems, brains, or (as it was previously believed) the ability to form complex thoughts. however, these molds were able to design this system quicker and more efficiently than humans ver have. they were even able to create a path for the shortest route through an IKEA.
the whole concept that organisms other than humans are unable to make decisions or solve complex problems is incredibly outdated and should have been disproven years ago when the Great Chain of Being was first challenged, but these ideas have stuck around for hundreds of years and are only now beginning to be opposed. for years, people thought that organisms like octopi could be tested on in labs because they were unable to feel pain or form thoughts, but only now is it being discovered that octopi have huge brains and are capable of numerous skills, they can recognize people and miss them, and they have the same or even better understanding of the world around them than humans. every other organisms' intelligence has been measured against humans for so long, that the idea that other creatures may have a different way of processing information is something completely unheard of.
in conclusion: brainless fungi and molds are redefining what humans believe to be 'intelligence' by exhibiting amazing navigation of obstacle courses, problem-solving and decision-making skills.