I got it on December 31st. It was an amazing way to start the year. My new pet slime mold is thriving now and is becoming one of the most interesting topics of this winter. The way it grows and behaves blows my mind.

I started the samples out with petri dishes, but they were not doing well and were shriveling up. I am not going to pretend to know what happened. One of them, though, was surviving. I decided to place it in a new container that I filled with dirt, sugar maple bark, and sprinkled oats for food. This was my best attempt at re-creating it's natural environment, the kind it had evolved over millions of years to survive in.

It took off.

Two days later, the span of the entire container has been explored by it. It had used the already existing mycelium as bridges to quickly grow around and explore.

January 14th Update: It has grown into and retreated from about every single place in the container now multiple times. I have lost track of where it is going and where it was. One day it can be big and puffy and the next it could be thin and hard to see. It can transform in one day so much that I do not even recognize it.

It seem to have one goal in mind. To find and digest oats. It does this cool thing where it normally spreads out and looks for food like a splat of sauce, but turns into little "yellow blood vessels" to eat more efficiently.

To get the coolest looking patterns, I have found that a good way to feed it is to stack oats like a tower, and to let the Physarum climb it. When it starts getting hungry again, it grows from the central point that is the tower.

I also tried cutting one of these blood vessels with my pocket knife and it started "Bleeding". Its yellow fluids leaked out until they formed a yellow bubble of Physarum Blood.

At this point I was starting to get bored with the Physarum. Just feeding it oats, watching it's yellowness move around. I knew what I wanted to do. Basically, if the Physarum is in a starvation emergency where it thinks it cannot survive as is, It will begin growing fruiting bodies. fruiting bodies produce airborne spores, allowing the Physarum's genes to live on as new Physarums.

I am going to starve it, forcing it into creating fruiting bodies. That should be interesting.

January 17 Update: Today, The fruiting bodies have Finally grown. I will show the process below.

Physarum has now gone extinct in the box with the fruiting bodies, probably due to starvation. The other box's Physarum is persisting, though. The Black Bread Mold is making a comeback with the lack of competition.