The blob – the single-cell slime mold – is perhaps the most cunning brainless organism on the planet. Blob lacks a nervous system. The scientists still don’t know how exactly to categorize this organism.
The blob is really one of the most extraordinary things on Earth today. The single-cell slime mold is perhaps the most cunning brainless organism on the planet. It’s been here on earth for millions of years and yet we still don’t really know what it is.
“We don’t really know if it’s an animal, if it’s a fungus or if it’s in-between”, said Bruno David, director of the French National Museum of Natural History in Paris.
He further added, “Sometimes it behaves like an animal. It is capable of memory. It is capable of having an adapted behavior. It is capable of solving problems, of moving around a labyrinth”.
Slime molds are protists — mostly single-cell organisms – are grouped into their own kingdom on the evolutionary family tree. Mainly because scientists aren’t sure where else to put them.
The blob is one of the standouts of the underlying kingdom of wayward organisms. The evolution of which began a billion years ago.
The blob has an exasperating ability to navigate without eyes, limbs or wings. When researchers put nutrients at the end of a maze, the blob searched for a way to the food, retreating from dead ends to find the shortest way possible.
Some people refer to it as “dog vomit” for its murky yellowish color, but its informal name comes from the film “The Blob,” a 1958 Steve McQueen B-movie about a creature from space that consumes two Pennsylvania towns in a bout of alien rage.
