\"While he has no mouth, neither stomach, nor eyes, the blob is perfect at detecting the presence of food and ingesting it,\" the Paris Zoo said in a translated tweet.
The zoo also said the blob, which has 720 sexes, does not have a brain or legs, but it \"moves at the speed of one centimeter an hour, four if it sprints.\"
\"The blob is difficult to place in the tree of life,\" Bruno David, the director of the Paris Museum of Natural History and Zoological Park, said in a statement. \"[It] teaches us a lot about the richness of life on Earth.\"
Dr. Audrey Dussutour, a researcher with the CNRS (translated to: National Scientific Research Center) who has studied blobs and works with the zoo, tweeted a short poem about the algae-like organism, also known as a eukaryotic protist.
Dussutour explained that while the \"Physarum polycephalum,\" aka the blob, has long been studied, this is the first time it will be on exhibit at a zoo.
Scientist did not just discovered Physarum polycephalum, it bas been studied for a long time. What's new is that it is now exhibited in @zoodeparis which is really great as it is a species you would not usually expect to meet in a zoo.
— Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique 🌍 (@CNRS) October 16, 2019
It is neither a plant, nor an animal, nor a mushroom ... It looks like a hoax, but it does exist: the blob is the quantum superposition of very ordinary species.https://t.co/63XJR1XfFHpic.twitter.com/3zdQUBsD7h
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