O.o its prob gonna eat me someday :0.
Slime mould might easily be one of the strangest life forms on our planet. They are neither plants, animals, nor fungi, but various species of complex, single-celled amoebas of the protist kingdom. Sometimes they form colonies able to grow, move, and even exhibit a strange kind of intelligence.
Even without a nervous system, they are able to learn about substances they encounter, retaining that knowledge and even communicating it to other slime moulds. Now a team of scientists at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) has figured out how: slime moulds actually absorb the substance into their veins.
Researchers at the CNRS’ Centre for Research on Animal Cognition conducted their experiments on a fascinating little fellow called Physarum polycephalum, a single-celled blob with multiple nuclei, and a popular candidate for studying slime mould intelligence. (Here you can see it navigate a maze. Cool!)
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