A Brainless Slime That Shares Memories by Fusing

salvadorcerinza (53)in #blog • 6 years ago

But when two or more mucous mold cells meet, the cell membranes separate each other and merge into a membrane.

When the mucous moulds are placed in a new environment, they spread in each direction in a fractal pattern, assessing the layout of the soil.

If you place oatmeal on a map ( your favourite meal with mucus molds ), mucous molds will find ways to link the source of food to the shortest routes.

If scientists take a piece of mucous mould that has solved a labyrinth and add it to another, the second mould will finish the labyrinth faster.

But when Reid put the rest of the petri dish in extracellular mucus before introducing the mucous moulds, only eight out of 24 found food.

Scientists have also simulated geographical limitations such as volcanoes and water bodies by confronting mucous mould with deterrent agents, such as fragments of salt or beams of light.

By doing so much with so few mucous moulds, they are a successful and admirable alternative to brain - based intelligence.

Results for the U - shaped navigational task of the trap on the treatment of empty agar and agar with extracellular goo.
On the other hand, our work has shown that in the absence of global information about its environment, the mucous mucus application uses the presence of extracellular slime to navigate through a complex environment, avoiding areas previously visited.

Mucous moulds achieve this with a simple behavioural mechanism : they prefer to avoid areas with non - cellular mucus from recent research.

Original cultures were derived from the Biological materials of the south, and laboratory inventories were subcultured daily on new agar - oats.

In order to obtain extracellular sludge, we allowed a culture of mucous mould to migrate ( 8 - 12 h ) across a 1 percent agar surface, leaving behind a trail of extracellular sludge.

After 48 h, we cut an 8. 6 cm diameter agar circle with extracellular mucus ( without a figurative biomass ) and placed it in a Petri dish of 8. 6 cm diameter.

Fossil evidence helps to address the long - standing debate on the development of ggfish, a "jaw - dropping, sea - dwelling slime" eels, and suggests that live vertebrates without jaws may not be as primitive as their anatomy suggests.

Social insects such as ants can create efficient paths that connect their nests and food sources by tracking pheromone paths.

It's just like human hikers, whose collective feet bring effective paths into the landscape, while boring or inefficient paths lead to excessive growth.
Reid suspects that such external memories are preceded by internal memories, and old creatures have used them to solve problems, similar to mucus fungi, long before neurons and brains develop.

In 2009, Atsushi Tero, from the University of Hokkaido, released a mucus mold on a Petri dish modelled on a map of the Tokyo metropolitan Area, with pieces of food in front of the main urban centres.

Human designers had created such a network to be as efficient as possible, the mucus mould had done the same, but without brain power.

Habituation is one of the easiest ways to learn, but mucous moulds have all their characteristics.

Even if three naive moulds merge with a habit, the resulting entity still shows signs of habit.

Essentially, the mucus mold remembers where it was, stores the memory in the outer environment and remembers the information when it touches the mucus - covered area later.

Avoiding areas where it has already been, the mucus mold finds its way out of the U - shaped trap and into the food source.

But while many creatures are capable of using space memory, our study is the first to demonstrate such an ability in a brainless creature.

Sources:

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/12/the-brainless-slime-that-can-learn-by-fusing/511295/

https://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/2139215-A-Brainless-Slime-That-Shares-Memories-by-Fusing

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/brainless-slime-molds/

https://www.livescience.com/57360-brainless-slime-mold-learns-and-teaches.html

https://psmag.com/environment/the-audacity-of-brainless-slime-mold-52042

http://theconversation.com/the-brainless-slime-mould-that-remembers-where-its-been-10015

https://news.cnrs.fr/articles/brainless-slime-can-share-learned-knowledge

https://2newthings.com/single-celled-slime-molds-share-memories-solve-problems/

https://www.pnas.org/content/109/43/17490