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	Hi, my name is Alex Prendergast, I'm a student studying botany at the University of Plymouth. I was having a read of your website which I do every so often and saw your mystery organism. I thought I’d have a go at winning that mist system. I need one! Hand spraying my moss and fern collections is getting time consuming!

I also reckon the mystery organism is a slime mould. I have a tropical-style bathroom with Monstera delicosa covering the walls and bromeliads and ferns everywhere else. One day my girlfriend found an organism, which looked very similar to this one. It was growing up the outside of the bowl of the toilet, and also spreading at an alarming rate! So much so that she refused to go in there until it had gone, which it did a few days later. My telling her that it's OK its just a slime mould didn't seem to help.

I'm no expert but at the time I narrowed it down to a Physarum species. Each cell can live alone, moving around like an amoeba and appear unnoticed in soil and on leaves etc. but at breeding time they come together to form structures like this, which is why they appear to grow so rapidly, the colony is not only growing by asexual reproduction but also by other cells migrating to and adjoining it. When they are together they can reproduce sexually and produce spores, which drift to colonise other areas, which is possibly how it got into your vivarium and my bathroom! When they are done reproducing they separate and go about their unicellular business again; munching on bits of dead plant material and the like. This could explain why the mystery organism appeared to ‘die’; I guess it didn’t die, but the individual cells just oozed away, leaving residues and a few dead cells behind.

I read an article a few years ago, which a scientist claimed that Physarum polycephalum had primitive intelligence because it could navigate a maze on an agar plate to find some food (oatmeal). I've copied the whole article below if you're interested!

P.S. I have a Selaginella willdenovii, which I bought back fro Malaysia, I'm usually pretty good with these kind of things but this selaginella is doing nothing but very slowly turning brown. It is in composted bark chips and under the same conditions as other, thriving, tropical ferns, club mosses and Nepenthes. Do you grow this species? Any ideas what I'm doing wrong?

Thanks,
Alex

This is the article:

When slime is not so thick

Slime before and after negotiating the maze.
Scientists have discovered that a single-celled organism can negotiate the shortest way through a maze. It means that some of the lowliest creatures in the plant and animal kingdoms, such as slime and amoeba, may not be as primitive as once thought. Pieces of slime mould, an amoeba-like organism, were enticed through a 30-square-centimetre (five-square-inch) maze by the prospect of food at the end of the puzzle. The researchers believe the slime is exhibiting some form of primitive intelligence. Toshiyuki Nakagaki of the Bio-Mimetic Control Research Centre, Nagoya, Japan, placed pieces of the slime mould Physarum polycephalum in an agar gel maze comprising four possible routes.
Normally, the slime spreads out its network of tube-like 'legs', called pseudopodia, to fill all the available space. But when two pieces of food were placed at separate exit points in the labyrinth, the organism squeezed its entire body between the two nutrients. It adopted the shortest possible route, effectively solving the puzzle.

'Cellular computation'
Announcing their findings in the journal Nature, the researchers say they believe the organism changed its shape to maximise its foraging efficiency and therefore its chances of survival.
The meal of ground oat flakes led to a local increase in contraction of the organism's tube-like structures, propelling it towards the food.

"This remarkable process of cellular computation implies that cellular materials can show a primitive intelligence," the team writes in Nature. Slime mould is one of a group of single- to multi-celled organisms traditionally classified as fungi but having characteristics of both plants and animals.
They reproduce by spores, but their cells can move like an amoeba and they feed by taking in particles of food.




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