The Incubator finally arrived! Two weeks later than expected, but it arrived! I took some pictures and we tested it out. On Monday we will use it to put a few of our cultures in their dormant stage. Remember that agar we left exposed? Well it dried out completely! It now has the appearance of a sheet of slightly-yellowed, transparent plastic. We will probably recreate the experiment with semi-defined (nutrient) agar and see if that changes anything!

After preparing more agar for our experiment yesterday, there is still nothing questionable growing on any of them, or anything at all for that matter. We left one dish agar exposed to the air, just to see if there was and is any contaminants around that we should be aware of and, from what we can see, there doesn’t seem to be. The sub-cultured Physarum Polycephalum is all doing extremely well at a fairly constant temperature of about 22 degrees.

Today we sub-cultured the plasmodiom into some petri dishes. It’s recommended that we use an incubator in this process but, as it hasn’t arrived, we are trying it without.

Today, SCK and I came up with a plan for proceeding in our inquiry.

Today the Slime mold arrived!! It’s in the fridge, where it can stay for up to a week! SCK and I searched for the brains behind the slime mold maze. SCK found a site listing 10 who did the experiment in 1995.

During our lunch period, SCK and I went out and bought supplies for our inquiry. We also submitted our inquiry plan.

After Gym this afternoon, SCK and I made up a list of things we’ll need for our project and reviewed a teachers guide provided by Mr. Sarte which was chalk full of useful knowledge on Physarum Polycephalum. I also began to do a write up of which we could post  on the wall of the Fishy Lab.

Over the course of both today and yesterday, SCK and I have updated our Inquiry Planner, talked to Mr. Sarte, and continue to respond to new threads posted on the UBC discussion board. Today Mr. Sarte also put in an order for the Physarum Polycephalum, so we can expect both that an a new incubator to arrive next week!

Today, SCK and I briefly discussed some plans for acquiring what we’ll need for our project and read the latest thread, posted by our teacher friend.

Today I did a bit more work on our Inquiry Planning sheet and put our question ‘How long does it take Slime Mold to solve a simple maze?’ on the board. Mr. Soiseth loved our question and was impressed we had done so much already! That’s encouraging!