Year: 2022

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE contemplates swarm behavior, swarm intelligence and individuality versus community living in the humble slime mold. You may find a slime mold in your back garden or in the local woods. But these creatures are far from simple. Without a brain, or with a nervous system, they are capable of remarkably complex data processing: thinking without a nervous system. View in LinkedIn

TWO KINGDOM MYOPIA: PLANTS VS ANIMALS. The new five kingdom system of classification overcomes some previous problems. https://lnkd.in/gYETt8v View in LinkedIn

COLLECTIVE BEHAVIOR. “Collective behaviour is apparent at all levels of biological organisation; bacteria act together to form rafts, plague-locusts march cohesively in bands, tiny termites build immense, sophisticated structures, swarms of honeybees ‘vote’ democratically for the location of their new home, and flocks of starlings collectively sense the direction of a predator's attack by compression waves propagating through the group.” https://lnkd.in/gxSdyJh View in LinkedIn

SWARM INTELLIGENCE. “The study of collective behaviour aims to understand how individual-level behaviours can lead to complex group-level patterns. Collective behaviour has primarily been studied in animal groups such as colonies of insects, flocks of birds and schools of fish.” https://lnkd.in/gXKQQtM View in LinkedIn

ANT SWARM INTELLIGENCE. “Ant colonies solve mazes using swarm intelligence. Swarm intelligence allows groups of organisms to solve problems that exceed the cognitive capabilities of individuals. Consider the case of an ant colony solving a maze. Many ants begin to walk the maze at random, depositing a trail of volatile pheromones behind them. The ant traffic which happens to flow along the shortest path of the maze can make more return trips (and hence lay more pheromone).” https://academic.oup.com/femsre/article/40/6/798/2400841 View in LinkedIn

A COLONIAL SLIME MOLD composed of voluntary individuals. https://lnkd.in/gzgbvqF View in LinkedIn

TIME LAPSE of slime mold colony growth over 8 hours, forming a giant fruiting body, a new community structure. https://lnkd.in/gNYfh5m View in LinkedIn

PULSING SLIME MOLD. https://lnkd.in/gw3tH27 View in LinkedIn

LARGEST SINGLE CELLED ORGANISM ON EARTH, that can grow to three square meters. They also find the quickest route to food on mazes. Slime molds can drive a robot. https://lnkd.in/gQjgVZg View in LinkedIn

LARGE CELLS. “A cellular slime mould Physarum polycephalum is a monstrously large single cell, visible by an unaided eye.” https://lnkd.in/gxgxfjB View in LinkedIn