Fun with Slime Molds

This summer I had the opportunity to attend the "Living in a Microbial World" workshop in Woods Hole and we did some fascinating work with slime molds. We cultured them on petri dishes and without knowing much about them, brainstormed some questions and developed our own experiments. Our specific experiment dealt with how pH affects the growth of a slime mold. IT was difficult to achieve conclusive results because their growth was difficult to measure. We also examined how slime mold growth affects the pH of the agar medium, as monitored using pH. This objective was also confounded because the oat we added changed hte pH of the agar - we could see an "aura" of different color around each oat.
The slime molds were fascinating creatures. One group found that their growth was inhibited somewhat by sunlight. They also seem to have the ability to crawl through mazes and find an oat. They would curve about in various ways and branch off, forming different shapes. They proved to be dramatic creatures, spreading out across the petri dish and at times crawling out of the petri dish if allowed to grow enough. I heartily recommend inquiry-based experiments with slime molds for any middle school and high school life science project.