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More Than You've Ever Wanted to Know About Plasmodial Slime Molds

We talked to one of the filmmakers of "The Creeping Garden" about the simple slime starring in his new movie. Oats are its favorite food!
Images courtesy of Film Forum

As a young woman in the prime of your life, you may not consider "plasmodial slime" high on your list of priorities, but ladies: That's where you're wrong.

In their new documentary, The Creeping Garden, showing this week at Film Forum in New York, filmmakers Jasper Sharp and Tim Grabham embarked on a three-year journey to understand why fringe scientists are fascinated by the slime that lives, apparently, all around us. A bizarre, somewhat arty exploration of what slime mold is, The Creeping Garden takes the primitive organism as its protagonist; the film simply puts the slime on display, as well as examines possible research applications for the oozy little guys, artificial intelligence being the most glamorous. Mostly enamored of the phrase "plasmodial slime mold," I talked to Grabham to learn more about why this simple, cool-sounding organism is worth knowing about. I don't want to give too much away, but I'm not saying I don't know what the next big pet trend is going to be.

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The Creeping Garden - official trailer from cinema iloobia on Vimeo.

BROADLY: OK. What is a slime mold, and why should we care?
Tim Grabham: A slime mold is a pretty ancient form of life that lives in forests and on rotting logs and in nature—kind of lives alongside fungus, really. But what's more interesting about it is that it seems to have this primitive intelligence and traces of primitive memory that make it compelling for scientists and researchers.

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Is that horrifying? That seems horrifying to me—like a recipe for a sci-fi disaster.
When Jasper, who co-directed the film with me, first came to me in a slightly weird meeting we were having after he helped promote my last film, he started introducing me to this stuff called slime mold, and I'm like, "I have no idea what you're talking about. What is this stuff?" He showed me videos of it crawling around mazes and, like, throbbing around. I'm an animator from way back, so I said, "My God, this stuff is amazing! Imagine that on the screen, throbbing around for the audience." It looks really like sci-fi, blob-like stuff. And then you've got all this weird, fringe science happening around it; you just realize that if you can get it right, it's going to be a great subject matter. You can find it in woods and forests.

You can just see it with your eye?
Some of the bigger ones—in the film there's this big yellow one that we have. Often it's called "Dog Vomit Slime Mold"—that's one of the most obvious ones. Some people just walk past it and don't notice, but if you stop and take a second look, then yeah, you actually realize that you can find them everywhere—especially in autumn, when it's a bit moist, not too hot.

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Did you form attachments to the molds? Could a weird person consider one her pet?
One of the people in the film, Heather, refers to a slime mold as her "pet" occasionally, in a slightly playful way. I never named mine; I draw the line there. But you want to keep them alive; you clean out their petri dish like you'd clean a rabbit hutch, give it food. You could do experiments where you see what happens when you give it loads of food. When you give it loads of food, it's a bit dull; it just sits there and eats. It's better when you sort of mildly starve it, because it has to be much more proactive in looking for food. I don't want to sound like I'm being unkind and some kind of weird slime mold experimentation camp or anything, but if you give it a little bit more of a challenging process to get to its food, you realize the growth patterns are far more dynamic and interesting. I ended up letting the food mold grow on the petri dishes, and it was kind of like slime mold versus food mold, seeing what would win.

Imagine that on the screen, throbbing around for the audience.

Let's go back to the "primitive memory." What makes slime mold so fascinating for researchers?
What is interesting about the primitive memory is two-fold: As [the slime mold] travels around its habitat, it doesn't tend to go over the places where it's already searched; it seems to know where it's been. It seems fairly ordinary for us, but why that's remarkable is that it's an unbelievably simple organism. How does it know that? Where is that processing taking place?

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We don't really cover it in the film, but a really, really compelling experiment was when they took some slime mold and on the hour, they would blow hot air onto it—which the slime mold doesn't like. It would recoil back from the heat. After a few hours of this, it got to the point where they would have blown the hot air on it, but they didn't, and the slime mold retracted anyway, as if it was pre-empting the fact that it was going to get hot air.

If you could work out [where the memory is coming from], you'd have a really interesting way of potentially creating artificial intelligence, artificial brains. The slime mold demonstrates that it's really good at creating efficient networks in which it will go from A to B in the most efficient route possible; therefore, it's quite good at mapping out transport networks. You may be familiar with an experiment they did where they laid out a map of the Tokyo metro, and on every station they put a little oat flake. (Oat flakes are slime molds' favorite food.) They realized that as the slime mold grew between the oat flakes, it was actually mirroring the Tokyo transport network, which is a hugely expensive, highly efficient network system devised by very brilliant designers.

It still seems vaguely insidious, but you're telling me it's good?
We sort of project those things onto it. It's just doing what it does. It's hunting for food; it's hunting for a good place to settle so it can send out its spores. I don't think it has any nefarious goals in mind. People have asked us, "How big does it get? Could it grow to an infinite size if you feed it? Could it become something that could start taking over?" Probably not, is the answer to that.

It's harmless, as well! You can touch it; it's not poisonous. I was doing a lot of stuff in my studio with it in petri dishes, and it's fine—you don't have to wash your hands every time you go near it or wear a mask.

Do you wash your hands anyway…?
I probably would wash my hands after—I wash my hands just walking in a room. But you're not going to get some crazy effect where it poisons you and makes you feel sick or trip out or whatever. One thing that is a little bit creepy when you're filming it in the studio is you might come in in the morning and open up the box where you keep it—you want to keep it in the dark, because it likes the dark—and sometimes it does have a Houdini aspect where it tries to escape from the petri dish, oozing out from the edges. It does look a little disconcerting; you have to scoop it back in.