A LIFE OF SLIME
Oct 01, 2020
4 minutes
WORDS JULES HOWARD
PHOTOS
ANDY SANDS/NPL
by
JULES HOWARD
The Paris Zoological Park opened an exhibit like no other in october 2019. Inside the glass tank, to the amazement of passers-by, was an organism that could think yet had no brain. That could remember without experiences. That could build information networks with an efficiency unmatched in the history of the human species. It was a slime mould. They called it ‘Le Blob’.
Slime moulds rarely feature in pub quizzes or nature documentaries, so why should we care about them? Let’s start with the basics. First, slime moulds aren’t just one kind of organism, but are rather a collective of organisms that closely resemble amoebae. Most
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