The Science of Mystery: Building a Better Crime Scene

Writing a murder mystery perhaps? If you haven’t heard of the mighty slime mold, consider yourself introduced!

I’m always on the lookout for cool things that tell a story. Factoids that expose a greater truth about the human condition, sardonic, sincere, or otherwise.

The slime mold caught my attention recently for exactly that reason.

What are slime molds?

Think you can find the best route between two places? Be more like a slime mold, and don’t think about it so much.

The slime mold is a unique, evolutionary branch of life on Earth. It is not a fungus like the name suggests, but a protist, which means it’s a eukaryote (like us with organelles) and – for the most part – are single-celled organisms. They are not an animal, a plant, a fungus, or a bacteria. They form their very own, cool, Earth-evolved class of life!

Why are you disproportionately excited about this, Kristi?

Because slime molds break an important protist rules – despite being a singe-celled group, some slime molds can form a a multicellular-like body that resembles a slug (plasmodium body). Technically it’s multinucleate, which means this cool slug is one giant cell… just with lots of clones shoved inside.

It’s brainless. Literally. No neurons, no higher organization. It’s a giant amoeba, a multi-personality protist masquerading as a slug. Did I mention it moves? Travelling at speed of up to 1.35 mm/second.

It also is a a better problem solver than you, or me. Make that all of us.

The Problem Solving Savant

Who could solve the puzzle cube in the fewest steps? My money is on the slime mold.

Network optimization is the name of the slime mold’s game. When in its slug body stage (which can get very big - up to 20 kilos and as large as a square metre), it has an uncanny ability to navigate complex environments, and find the most optimal path to say, a source of food (important decomposer), or to a more ideal environment. Sans brain.

For the most part, slime molds do this through biochemical signalling through the cytoplasm. They take in information from their surroundings (a signal that there is food or a location is getting too dry) and the cytoplasm reacts, contracting and propelling itself towards or away. The interesting part is that (perhaps because there is no brain to think and clog up the work) the slime mold is constantly and intuitively reacting to the environment as things change on a biochemical level. A change in the concentration of signal or direction? It changes course. Constantly, a the speed of biochemistry. The result researchers have found is that the path these slime molds take towards their object of desire its about the most optimal you could devise.

Coming to a crime scene near you, the mighty slime mold!

That’s cool.

What Does it Have to do With Mystery and Building Crime Scenes?

When investigators look at a crime scene, they’re ‘thinking’ about how a perpetrator might have set things up. The lesson from slime molds is that our ‘thinking parts’ might not always be our best friend. On two levels – how evidence came to lay where it is and how someone might have carried out a crime – we could be over thinking things. And it has researchers attempting to use slime molds (in models. They aren’t being released into crime scenes; that’s firmly sci-fi on the genre scale – but also cool) in models to check their work, improve forensic investigation strategies, and learn how to better search crime scenes.

Mystery? Meet Science Fiction, You’re New Best Friend!

How would I use the mighty-slime mold in a story? Off the top of my head, I’d use it to illustrate how forensics is an evolving area of research. Shows often like to make the forensic science seem bullet proof but as a result they gloss over everything we don’t know. I’d maybe have a forensic student, an assistant (also a ju—jitsu enthusiast - those folks LOVE slime molds for obvious reasons), visit our investigators crime scene and explain how the visually obvious assumptions are, well, wrong on a biological scale. It make for a more innovative approach to the ‘how’ of a murder or theft, and I think there’s real advantage to bringing a reader into the nuts and bolts of how scientists figure these things out. I’d also be inclined to use it as a group of side plot podcasters, convinced they’ve figured out a way to use slime molds to prove their own theories about a decades old crime, inject themselves into a cold case, but the world is your slime mold!

Next week, in solidarity with the penguins who’ve been dragged into a trade war, I’ll figure out a way to feature these cool critters!

Next week? I think I’m going to have to rope penguins into the subject. Those poor penguins didn’t deserve to be brought into an international Tarif war. The deserve better, gosh darn it!