Researchers have shown that the slime mold, an organism without anything that resembles a nervous system (or, for that matter, individual cells), is capable of impressive feats of navigation. It can even link food sources in optimally spaced networks. Now, researchers have shown it’s capable of filling its environment with indications of where it has already searched for food, allowing it to “remember” its past efforts and focus its attention on routes it hasn’t explored.
And it does this all using, as the authors put it, “a thick mat of nonliving, translucent, extracellular slime.” As you might expect, given the name.
Via Marginal Revolution.
