Re: What would be involved with keeping a pet myxomycete?

Hey Tiago!

This is a really interesting question. I am very interested in fungi, and slime molds ( myxomycetes [slime molds] and acrasiomycetes [cellular slime molds]) are such weird organisms! Myxomycytes are especially interesting because they pop up so quickly (sometimes overnight) and then move around until they dry up to release spores.

The trouble, I think, with culturing wild samples of myxomycetes is that they are not single organisms during their entire life cycle. For most of their life cycle they are separate amoebae. Only under environmental stress do they aggregate, forming what we recognize as a slime mold. To culture a slime mold you would need to find a way to keep the separate amoebae stressed, but not kill them. I’m not sure such a thing is possible in the long time, and would certainly not be practical.

The second problem would be that in any kind of cultured system, bacteria and other fungi will contaminate, outcompete, and kill the slime mold. In nature there are so many tiny environmental niches that different organisms can fill and flourish. In a cultured system, there is only one niche available, and the organisms we seek to culture are rarely the “most fit.” In the laboratory when people culture slime molds (Dictyostelium discoideum, an acrasiomycete is a commonly used model organism to study signaling and movement), they do it in a sterile way to prevent other microorganisms from taking over the culture. It would be very, very difficult for somebody to do that at home.

Having said all that – and probably disappointed you – there are recipes out there for culturing myxomycetes. They are based mostly on agar, which you can order online or find sometimes at health food stores. I’m including a link to a ~190KB PDF document from the University of Arkansas’s Eumycetozoan project which includes some tips for culturing slime molds. Culturing requires sterile petri plates (you can find online) and autoclaving (you can use a home canning sterilizer). If you choose to try these, please be careful. Contaminating fungi and bacteria could potentially be harmful.

I hope this answers your questions!

Billy.

Useful Methods for Bringing Field Collections of Myxomycetes into Agar Culture. University of Arkansas.

Sterile Technique. Vanderbilt’s Structure Core/Chazin Lab.

ht tp://structbio.vanderbilt.edu/chazin/wisdom/labpro/sterile.html

Myxomycota . University of Hawaii. Dr. George Wong, Botany 201.

http://www.botany.hawaii.edu/faculty/wong/bot201/myxomycota/myxomyco ta.htm

Acrasidae . Wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Acrasidae

Eumycetozoan Project. University of Arkansas.

http://slimemold.uark.edu/