Post by Dividavi on Feb 7, 2024 21:00:12 GMT
www.wired.com/2012/09/slime-molds-take-over-world/
ADAM MANN
SCIENCE
SEP 21, 2012 1:30 PM
Slime Molds Take Over the Globe
By traveling from city to city on a map, microscopic protists known as slime molds have figured out how to take over the world.
By traveling from city to city on a map, microscopic protists known as slime molds have figured out how to take over the world.
Starting in Beijing, the slime mold Physarum polycephalum developed a well-organized network for global domination that mimicked historic trade routes like Asia’s Silk Road. The work, carried out by computer scientist Andrew Adamatzky from the University of the West of England, was published on arxiv on Sept. 18.
“The main idea of these experiments was to satisfy my curiosity -- what would happen if the Chinese decided to "expand" their country and colonize the world,” wrote Adamatzky in an e-mail to Wired.
Much like an ant colony searching for food, slime molds send out tiny feeler tubes in different directions. When one limb happens upon a food source, it spreads over it, secreting digestive enzymes to consume its find. In this way, the mold creates a network for transporting nutrients and chemicals for intercellular communication.
Despite having no brains, slime molds are clever creatures, capable of solving mazes, modeling cancer growth, and even packing bacteria away in their released spores as to-go snacks. One of the most popular recent tricks that researchers have them do is spread between food sources representing different cities, often creating efficient networks that mimic real-world transportation systems.
The recent research is of this latter variety, but taken to a global scale. Adamatzky coated a globe with agar and then removed the areas over oceans. He placed oat flakes at the locations of 24 different cities on a globe, which were selected for their size and proximity to each other. They included places like Tokyo, Mumbai, Tehran, Lagos, New York City, and Mexico City. The slime mold was started at Beijing and let loose.
The results sound either like a horror movie or a really good game of Risk. On day one, the slime mold colonized the east, taking over Seoul, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Ha Noi, and Ho Chi Min. It also reached over to the Indian subcontinent, finding Kolkata, Mumbai, Delhi, and Karachi. Day two saw the organism link Karachi to Tehran and from there to Istanbul, Lagos, and Kinshasa. Istanbul took it to Moscow, Moscow took it to London, London to Iceland, and Iceland to Greenland. By the fifth day it settled North America and then on the sixth, South America. In this time, it had also succeeded in growing over Australia and New Zealand, completing its world domination.
Adamatzky ran the same scenario eight more times on the globe and 30 times on a flat map. Each experiment had the slime mold conquering the world in a slightly different way. The only thing that thwarted its growth each time was the Pacific Ocean, which was too big to cross.
The world-spanning results didn’t have too many real world counterparts; humans have never completed the massive engineering projects necessary for such an endeavor. But at least over Asia, the slime mold network corresponded nicely to the ancient Silk Road, which connected Europe and the Far East during the first millennium A.D., bringing goods, technology, ideas, and eventually the Black Death. The mold also corresponded fairly accurately to the modern Asian Highway network, which consists of 87,000 miles of roads running between 32 countries. In total, the slime mold approximated about 76 percent of the Silk Road and Asian Highway routes.
The results may also represent a glimpse of a possible future.
“China is a 'sleeping' superpower which may become a new world empire at some stage of the world's evolution,” Adamatzky wrote. “Not now, but may be in next 100 to 200 years. So, I was curious to see what will happen and how things will develop…”
Images: Adamatzky, A. "The World's Colonisation and Trade Routes Formation as Imitated by Slime Mould," arxiv, Sept. 18
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