The southern bit doesn't strike me as efficient at all. to go to a neighbouring blob, you'd have to go all the way to the central one, and then back down again.
"When making experiments it is difficult to resist an impulse to imitate a largescale disaster leading to contamination of one of the urban areas spreading
to the surrounding areas."
Sim City players and biology academics are basically the same then, it would seem!
I wnder if you could build elevation into this sort of 'analog simulation', maybe in the form of something that a slime mould doesn't like to grow over?
It would probably be tough to get them to grow like switchbacks, tunnels, and bridges though...