PARIS • A Paris zoo has showcased a mysterious new organism, dubbed the "blob", a yellowish unicellular small living being which looks like a fungus but acts like an animal.
This newest exhibit at the Paris Zoological Park, which goes on public display tomorrow, has no mouth, no stomach, no eyes, yet it can detect food and digest it.
The Physarum Polycephalum, or the blob, also has almost 720 sexes, can move without legs or wings and heals itself in two minutes if cut in half.
"The blob is a living being which belongs to one of nature's mysteries," Mr Bruno David, director of the Paris Museum of Natural History of which the Zoological Park is part, said on Wednesday.
"It surprises us because it has no brain but is able to learn... and if you merge two blobs, the one that has learned will transmit its knowledge to the other," Mr David added.
The blob was named after a 1958 science-fiction horror B-movie starring a young Steve McQueen, in which an alien life form - The Blob - consumes everything in its path in a small Pennsylvania town.
"We know for sure it is not a plant but we don't really know if it's an animal or a fungus," said Mr David. "It behaves very surprisingly for something that looks like a mushroom... it has the behaviour of an animal, it is able to learn."
REUTERS
