Deep in our forests, something is on the move. Reminiscent of a horror movie, it consumes everything in its path. It's a mysterious blob known as a slime mould. Subtitles by SteamTeamExtra It's not a plant, animal or fungus.
It's just one giant cell. So bizarre, even scientists struggle to define it. Changing its shape, it explores the forest looking for bacteria to feed on. Dr Ian Hands Portman from the University of Warwick has been studying wild slime moulds he finds in his local woods. Ian, hi.
Hi. Miranda, nice to meet you. Good to see you.
So how's the slime mould hunting going then? So there's a tiny little white trace down here. And that's a slime mould, is it?
That's probably a slime mould, but you can never quite be sure unless you actually sit down and watch it and wait for it to move. Bearing in mind they move at a centimetre an hour. There's no definite appearance of what one looks like?
No, I think because they're liquid organisms, basically, there's ability to change their shape. I'd have to take it back to the lab to have a proper look. In the lab, Ian has been keeping slime moulds as pets to study the mystery of this slow-moving, shape-shifting blob.
What are you feeding them on? I'm feeding it oats, porridge oats, which is pretty much all they need to live off in captivity. So how does an organism that doesn't have a mouth and a stomach actually eat? They break down the protein and the carbohydrates, the sugars. and then it'll just absorb the goo that they've produced.
And what about the movement? How does it actually move and navigate its way around? They have this little sort of pulsing motion, so it pushes the tendrils towards that food.
So gradually, it just moves that little bit further towards something it likes, that little bit further away from something it doesn't like. To see these moving tendrils, Ian uses a high-powered microscope. This level of detail reveals how complex a slime mold really is. Wow! There's a lot of movement there.
What can I see? You can actually see the little food particles moving around in there. They're not just picking up the food and shuttling it around, they're also tasting the area they're around and sharing information back into the main body.
The whole thing's basically a network. This network means an exploring slime can learn about its surroundings and work out the best routes to travel. But how clever is it? To find out, we set it a challenge.
On this map of Britain, we put an oat flake on each major city. Can the slime find the most efficient route between them? Last thing to do is to put a nice blob of slime on right in the middle of central London. I love this, the London slime mould. Using time-lapse cameras, we record its progress over a number of days.
The exploring slime mould covers Britain in just two days. Tendrils on oats send a message to the rest of the slime mould that it's found food. The cell then withdraws, leaving the most direct routes to our cities, creating an efficient network in less than a week. And what's most surprising is that it looks remarkably like our road system.
This unassuming organism has proved itself to be a true mastermind, but one we still don't fully understand.