The artifacts and antiquities on display at an eastern North Carolina museum are virtually a treasure trove of the unusual, but it was something growing in the Cowan Museum of History and Science’s botanical garden that drew PRE’s Annette Weston to Kenansville for this month’s Weird Science.
Kenansville got its 15 minutes of fame on the global stage in 2010, when, not long before they were to take the stage at the Duplin County Event Center... the opening act had already begun... North Carolina Alcohol Law Enforcement agents boarded Willie Nelson’s bus and charged six of his band members with possession of marijuana and moonshine.
Anne Skinner is the Stem Educator at the Cowan Museum of History and Science, and she led me on a tour of the exhibits – including a concert promotion hanging on the wall. “This is the poster for it,” she explained. “In 2010 he was supposed to perform at the (Duplin County) Event Center, which is just really close to here.”
Many people questioned whether Nelson, an outspoken advocate for pot legalization, was targeted by the ALE, when it was revealed that the pre-planned bust was named "Operation On the Road Again." ALE denied that.
"They smelled the marijuana and found a bunch of moonshine and arrested them and Willie was not happy,” Skinner said. Three band members pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct. Their fines were only $25.
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And other artifacts at the museum predate the U.S. Poison Control Center, Skinner said, like, “These medicines had kind of surprising ingredients -- like this cough syrup and that cold syrup both had chloroform in them, and they also used turpentine to cure coughs.”
But Skinner said an accidental discovery in the museum’s botanical garden – which includes native plants, like the long-leaf pine and elderberries and other North Carolina plants, as well as a kitchen garden with a variety of herbs used in cooking – that was a real oddity.
She said, “We noticed this strange looking stuff growing on the mulch and we discovered that its name was dog vomit slime mold, which is pretty descriptive and describes pretty much exactly what it looks like.”
Yep, like a yellow puddle of dog barf.
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But even though it’s called a slime mold, Skinner said, actually, “It is not a mold and it's not fungus. It's not plant or animal, it's in the Kingdom Protista and it's more closely related to amoebas.”
So, a single-celled organism that can clump together and become one organism with multiple nuclei. One remarkable difference is that it moves. Like a huge amoeba, streaming over the surface it’s living on, engulfing decaying organic materials and eating the microbes – especially bacteria -- as it goes. “Oozing along maybe an inch a day or something.”
But that’s far from the most remarkable feature of dog vomit slime mold. Skinner said, “It doesn't have organs. It doesn't have a brain, no nerves, no neurons. And yet some researchers have found that it can do surprising things that some of them would call it cognition or thinking."
One type of learning Skinner said the organism has been known to use is habituation.
“For instance, a horse walking along the edge of a road the first time that traffic goes by, it's probably going to act very startled, but the 50th time is going to totally ignore the traffic because it has gotten used to it, or habituated, to it,” she said.
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About five years ago, Skinner said French researcher Audrey Dussutour placed some petri dishes of the slime mold across from other dishes that contained their favorite snack other than bacteria – oatmeal -- but put a bridge coated in bitter flavored gelatin they’re known to dislike between the organism and breakfast.
“They can't think, but they kind of figured out that, ‘Oh, it's yucky, but it's not harming me,’ and it went across the bridge,” she said.
The same French researcher dried out some dog vomit slime mold – which essentially makes it dormant – and Skinner said when it was rehydrated, “They still have that same learning. They still essentially remember, and I don't know if we can really use the word for remember for something that doesn't even have a brain, but they were still habituated.”
And she added, "You can put them in a blender and mix them up with other slime molds and the learning is transferred to the other ones.”
Museum Director Robin Grotke has written a book called A Museum’s Garden: Secrets, Wonders and Delights which details the exhibits, and in it is a chapter about the mold – and its ties to Scandinavian folklore. She notes that the tale handed down claims slime mold comes from a troll cat – a witch’s familiar that sucks the milk from cows and breaks into people’s homes to steal cream -- which becomes troll cat butter that it vomits up on planks and logs after a foggy night.
In Finnish mythology, the mold is told to be the secretion of Para -- a farm elf -- basically a menacing little shape-shifting goblin that steals stuff for its master or mistress. If the elf is killed, its owner dies too. The tale goes that Para used to steal milk and butter from the neighbors and sometimes it vomited or pooped out some of the butter into the forest.
In researcher Audrey Dussutour’s book detailing the organism, Le Blob, she said in the 70s, a woman in Texas found a dog vomit slime mold and tried to kill it. She used a garden hoe and smashed it, but the next day it had doubled in size. She tried to poison it but it only changed color and was still fine. She was scared, so she called the firemen, and they sprayed it with water, but it continued to grow. She then decided to call the police, and they shot it. The slime mold eventually disappeared because it went dormant. In a news article about the incident, the Washington Post said that she had been visited by an alien.
