Today at 9:24 am we put the slime mould into the maze!  We took a small piece of it with the agar it was on (from one of our first sub-cultures) and placed it upside down at the start of the maze.  We put several oat flakes at the end of the maze.  After watching it and taking photographs periodically every half hour, it didn’t look like it was growing much so we gave it an extra oat flake at 12:50 pm, thinking maybe it didn’t have enough food to be able to get all the way to the finish.  It has grown minimally since this morning (less than a centimeter in the last 5 hours).  Considering the top growing speed we read about online (1-1.8 cm/hr.), we are wondering if a) it didn’t have enough food or b) we didn’t put enough slime mould in to start with.  My partner is planning to take it home and keep photographing it as time progresses.  Hopefully it won’t grow too much during the night.  The maze is quite large in comparison to the organism, so it could take a while.

We have been keeping the rest of the cultures in the incubator as they seem to grow better in there, and have started the process of making sclerotia again with our original culture.  We changed the oat flakes in what was left of the original culture and put it back in the incubator to keep warm.