We're just about two weeks away from Halloween, which is a special time at the zoo. It provides a great opportunity to highlight animals that many people fear, such as snakes, spiders, rats, and bats. It may not have had the holiday in mind, but the Paris Zoo has decided to celebrate with the unveiling of a creature straight from the B-movies: a brainless protist slime mold, which demonstrates the ability to move and to solve problems. Oh, and it has over 700 distinct sexes.
Being a protist, the blob isn't an animal, which might make its inclusion in a zoo seem odd. I love the idea, though. I think it would be fascinating to display this organism, perhaps alongside a representative plant and fungi species, maybe some bacteria under a high-powered microscope, so that visitors can begin to understand a question that may seem very simple at first - "What IS an animal, anyway?" What makes a lump of coral, which many people mistake for a rock, an animal, while this moving, "thinking" mold is not?
Previous attempts to maintain these slime molds - Physarum polycephalum - were short-lived, but that was decades ago. Hopefully the Paris Zoo staff will be able to take advantage of all that we've learned about these organisms since and help their display colony thrive. If they do, these blobs could be a fixture at zoos and aquariums and botanical gardens and museums around the world.
Researchers grew the zoo's "blob" - a protist species thought to exist for billions of years - in petri dishes. (Photo by Stephane de Sakutin/AFP via Getty Images)
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