




Here I have given the the slime mould Physarum polycephalum a choice of five different naturally pigmented bacterial pastes to eat. At first it ignored the bacteria and skirted around them. Next when I provided it with oats it swarmed towards and all over these. Now it has exhausted the oats and begun, perhaps reluctantly, to feed on the bacteria.
In the video, I used a microscope to focus upon the area where it is consuming the blue bacteria, and you can clearly see fragments of the blue bacterial past integrated into the slime mould structure and moving within the cytoplasm.