Many-headed Slime Mold

Sadly blurry, but still such a very cool slime mold!!

This enigmatic slime mold moves using shuttle streaming, which is characterized by rhythmic back-and-forth flow of the protoplasm. Incredibly, this slime mold exhibits intelligent characteristics similar to those seen in single-celled creatures and social insects. For example, it is able to solve the shortest path problem - When grown in a maze, P. polycephalum will retract from everywhere in the maze, except the shortest route connecting the food sources, thus producing efficient networks by getting to the food using the shortest route. Amazing!

When I saw this slime mold, I was amazed that it actually appeared to be pulsating - if you watch closely over a period of several minutes, you can see it moving. I wish I had thought to take video or had some "slime" lapse images, but I was too in awe of this slime while watching it to remember that my camera could take video ;). It was THAT cool.