Feed a few oats every day or two.
As far as pets go, those care instructions seem like the ideal minimalist pet. Or so I thought.
Growing slime molds in a moist chamber is one of the projects in my upcoming book, The Naturalist at Home: Projects for Discovering the Hidden World Around Us, and there’s a bonus activity of keeping a pet slime mold, so I thought I’d keep one myself. I quickly found the care instructions are a little minimal. It’s true that slime molds are infinitely less care than dogs, cats, rabbits, ferrets and other common pets. However, it’s not quite as simple as just tossing in a couple oats and watching it grow.
My pet slime mold arrived in a petri dish, growing on an agar base. A handful of oats had been thrown in and the slime mold was obviously healthy and growing as I could see by its spread over a few of the oats. So I set it on my desk and sat back ready to enjoy watching the fascinating growth patterns of my new pet slime mold.
But I was unprepared for just how fast that growth would be.
In less than 24 hours, the slime mold had grown to maybe three times the size it was when it had arrived.
The following day, two days after it had arrived, the slime mold had spread to the edges of the large petri dish almost all the way around. Over the next few days I gave it a few oats every day and cleaned out the old ones every few days. One day, nine days after it had arrived, I didn’t give it any oats and by the next morning there was a slimy blob on my desk as it tried to escape.
By that time I started worring about accidentally killing it, so I decided to split it and grow new slime molds as a backup. (There’s something you can’t do with a pet dog or cat!)
I’ll write about the next generation in the next Diary of a Pet Slime Mold.
Where did you get your slime mold pet from please?