A yellow, unicellular blob, with no brain, legs, wings, mouth, stomach or eyes that can still move about, eat and heal itself, has been unveiled at the Paris Zoological Park.
Dubbed “the blob” (after a 1950s Steve McQueen horror film), the organism, resembling a yellow fungus, will go on exhibit on Saturday and has been described as “one of nature’s mysteries” by Bruno David, the Paris Museum of Natural History’s director.
In a series of tweets by the Paris Zoological Park, it was explained that the blob can still sense and consume food despite having no mouth or eyes. With no legs or wings, it can still move at a speed of two centimetres per hour (four if it sprints).
If the Blob is cut in half, it can heal itself in just two minutes. It has proven itself capable of having a memory and of adapting to conditions. And, most curiously, it can have up to 720 sexes.
According to David, speaking to AFP, it is not yet known whether the Blob is an animal, a fungus or something in between the two. What is known is that it has been on earth for millions of years.
Its scientific name, Physarum polycephalum, translates to “the many-headed slime”.
Various explanations have been posited to explain its intelligence, despite its lack of a nervous system. One explanation uses differential equations and electrical signals to show how it can compute the shortest distance to a path—suggesting that it relies on a form of natural algorithm.
The blob has potential applications in bio-computing, having been proved to function as a kind of biological logic-gate (a crucial component for computers). A study published in Nature in 2000 showed how a plasmodium from the same could navigate a maze in the shortest route possible.
In 2006, as part of an experiment conducted by researchers at the University of Southampton and Kobe University, the blob’s reactions to external stimuli were used to control a small robot.