When a slime mold mass or mound is physically separated, the cells find their way back to re-unite. Studies on Physarum polycephalum have even shown an ability to learn and predict periodic unfavorable conditions in laboratory experiments. John Tyler Bonner, a professor of ecology known for his studies of slime molds, argues that they are "no more than a bag of amoebae encased in a thin slime sheath, yet they manage to have various behaviors that are equal to those of animals who possess muscles and nerves with ganglia – that is, simple brains."

1. Physarum polycephalum
("many-headed slime")
Unicunts > Amoebozoa > Mycetozoa > Myxogastria > Physarales






Recent studies showed that Physarum polycephalum, more commonly known as slime mold, forms highly efficient networks within the given environmental and resource constraints it is placed in. Our research was inspired by a study conducted in Tokyo, which revealed that cleverly manipulated slime mold is able to model the local railway system that had taken engineers and designers countless hours to make efficient and cost effective (Tero 2010)
[...]
Physarum polycephalum has been shown to exhibit characteristics similar to those seen in single-celled creatures and eusocial insects. For example, a team of Japanese and Hungarian researchers have shown P. polycephalum can solve the Shortest path problem. [...] Some researchers claim that P. polycephalum is even able to solve the NP-hard Steiner minimum tree problem.[9]
[...]
P. polycephalum can not only solve these computational problems, but also exhibits some form of memory. By repeatedly making the test environment of a specimen of P. polycephalum cold and dry for 60-minute intervals, Hokkaido University biophysicists discovered that the slime mold appears to anticipate the pattern by reacting to the conditions when they did not repeat the conditions for the next interval. Upon repeating the conditions, it would react to expect the 60-minute intervals, as well as testing with 30- and 90-minute intervals.[10][11]

Even though complex computations using Physarum as a substrate are currently not possible, researchers have successfully used the organism's reaction to its environment in a USB sensor[20] and to control a robot.[21]





2. Choreocolax
Marine red alga.
> Archaeplastida > Rhodophyta > Florideophyceae > Rhodymeniophycidae

This motherfucker interesting because it behaves very virus-like. Now THAT's spooky.

During the normal course of infection, nuclei are transferred via secondary pit connections from the parasitic marine red alga Choreocolax to its red algal host Polysiphonia. These “planetic” nuclei are transmitted by being cut off into specialized cells (conjunctor cells) that fuse with an adjacent host cell, thereby delivering parasite nuclei and other cytoplasmic organelles into host cell cytoplasm. Within the foreign cytoplasm, planetic nuclei survive for several weeks and may be active in directing the host cellular responses to infection, since these responses are seen only in host cells containing planetic nuclei. The transfer and long-term survival of a nucleus from one genus into the cytoplasm of another through mechanisms that have evolved in nature challenge our understanding of nuclear-cytoplasmic interactions and our concept of “individual.”

2.1. Fate of Parasite and Host Organelle DNA during Cellular Transformation of Red Algae by Their Parasites.
In this study, we examined whether the proplastids and mitochondria that occur in these red algal adelphoparasites are acquired from their host or whether they are unique to the parasite and are brought into the host along with the parasite nucleus. To establish their origins and fates, plastid and mitochondrial restriction fragment length polymorphisms (RFLPs) of parasite cells were compared with those of their host plastid and mitochondrial DNA in three host and parasite pairs. For plastids, no RFLP differences were found between hosts and parasites, supporting an earlier conclusion, based on microscopic studies, that the proplastids of parasites are acquired from their hosts. For mitochondria, characteristic RFLP differences were detected between host and parasite for two of the pairs of species but not for the third. Evidence of the evolutionary difference between hosts and their parasites was shown by RFLP differences between nuclear ribosomal repeat regions.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12242362
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC391716/





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