Slime Mold Network

A Japan-based research team found that if they placed bits of food (oat flakes) around a central Physarum in the same location as 36 outlying cities around Tokyo, the mold created a network connecting the food sources that looked rather like the existing rail system.

"Self-organization, self-optimization and self-repair as it naturally occurs in the slime mold Physarum polycephalum are capabilities that may be required for technological systems such as mobile communication networks or networks of dynamically connected computational devices"

http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=what-we-can-learn-from-slime-mold-h-2010-01-21