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Here’s a new, and slightly gross, take on transportation planning – let the slime molds take a shot at it.

A group of researchers from the University of the West of England, in Bristol, England, are using slime molds – fungus like organisms commonly found on forest floors – to find the most efficient transportation routes for national highway systems.

details their work and even has a video of the slime molds in action.

When placed on a map of Mexico, with food sources at each major city strategically placed to draw the slime mold’s attention, the group found that the paths taken by the slime mold pretty much exactly followed the existing Mexican highway system.

In similar tests on a map of the United Kingdom, the unseemly creatures actually suggested a few more efficient alternate transportation routes.

Believe it or not, this is something the Japanese came across even before the Brits started playing around with it. of how slime molds followed mazes and looked at subway route planning in Tokyo.

And published in the Journal Science.

Could this be the future of TriMet? Probably not. But it certainly is high up there on today’s weird-o-meter.