A ‘new’ organism, dubbed the “blob”, is a small yellowish unicellular living being which resembles a fungus but behaves like an animal and too has 720 sexes.
This latest exhibit of the Paris Zoological Park, which on Saturday goes on display to the public, has no eyes, no stomach, no mouth, yet it can pinpoint food and digest it. The blob can move without wings or legs and heals itself in nearly two minutes if chopped in half.
The slime mould, which is officially known as physarum polycephalum (or “the multiple headed slime”) is neither a fungus, plant or an animal. It doesn’t possess two sexes — female and male — it has 720! And it can also divide into different organisms and then meld back together, accordant to a Zoological Park press release.
The unicellular being is presumed to be approx a billion years old, however it initially came to the public’s eye in May 1973, after a woman from Texas discovered a speedily-expanding yellow blob burgeoning in her backyard.
The Texas blob perished as swiftly as it had appeared, and the world pretty much forgot about the puzzling slime until 2016 when new research published prompted a commotion in the science community.
The research, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society journal and authored by Audrey Dussutour, a French National Center for Scientific Research biologist, displayed that physarum polycephalum could understand to ignore pernicious substances, and recollect that behavior up to a year later.
The mold is too believed to be adept of solving problems, like foreseeing changes in its environment and finding the quickest way to exit a labyrinth, accordant to Zoological Park scientific researchers.
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