Since the purpose of this activity is to link food sources together and to transport nutrients around the creature, Atsushi Tero at Hokkaido University in Japan and his colleagues wondered if slime-mould transport networks bore any resemblance to human ones. As they report in Science, they built a template with 36 oat flakes a favoured food source placed to represent the locations of cities in the region around Tokyo. They put P. polycephalum on Tokyo itself, and watched it go.

They found that many of the links the slime mould made bore a striking resemblance to Tokyo’s existing rail network. For P. polycephalum had not simply created the shortest possible network that could connect all the cities, but had also included redundant connections that allow the creature and the real rail network to have resilience to the accidental breakage of any part of it. P. polycephalum’s network, in other words, had similar costs, efficiencies and resiliencies to the human version.

via Railways and slime moulds: A life of slime | The Economist.