Reasons a slime mold will likely not kill me.

Single-celled slime molds demonstrate the ability to memorize and anticipate repeated events, a team of Japanese researchers reported in January. The study [pdf] clearly shows “a primitive version of brain function” in an organism with no brain at all.

Slime Molds Show Surprising Degree of Intelligence

Just think about that for a minute. And then reflect on our assumptions about how humans manipulate and control our environment. And then think back to the fact that SLIME MOLDS CAN LEARN. Due to my ever increasing anxiety about well, everything, my coworkers bullied me in to creating a rating scale. A threat assessment, if you will, of every day objects and their likelihood of killing me if they had the opportunity.

Slime molds, in their relationship to everything else on the list, had a fairly low threat assessment. For a slime mold to be able to kill me I'd have to be:

1. Close to a slime mold
2. Virtually incapacitated or the slime mold would have to be very large
3. In an environment where the learning ones were learning things that humans wanted them to learn.

So while the initial shock of discovering a brainless organism has the capacity to learn and adapt its behavior, it's a very slim possibility it will jump out and destroy me. Thank goodness. Just remind me to stay the hell out of the Olympic national forest.

Bone eating snot flowers are a different story.