Everyone give a warm welcome to this strange living blob, our latest harbinger of doom
In a week that’s given us both an Iowa family whose basement was flooded with blood and some exceptional footage of a whale carcass being devoured by “bone-eating worms and octopus swarms,” the debut of a living blob at the Paris Zoological Park is starting to feel like some dread portent. The signs are appearing one after another now, and the latest is a slimy herald of the abyss that’s come to France to announce, through its weirdo biology alone, that a new era is fast approaching.
Consider the blob in question, a “mysterious new organism” shown off by the dark priests of the Paris Zoological Park that Reuters describes as a “yellowish unicellular small living being which looks like a fungus but acts like an animal.” Photos of The Blob don’t look particularly exciting to the untrained eye, but, after having presumably chanted over a glowing pentagram behind the penguin enclosure for days on end, the Park is very happy to describe the oddity of the discovery they’ve summoned: An impossible thing that “has no mouth, no stomach, no eyes,” and no brain, but that can still “detect food and digest it.”
Still small for now, The Blob is clearly biding its time, appearing non-threatening as it unthinkingly grows stronger, moving “without legs or wings” and probably just sort of enjoying the erotic possibilities of being a bizarre organism that “has almost 720 sexes” and is capable of “[healing] itself in two minutes if cut in half.”
Named after the 1958 movie (because even supposedly neutral scientists understand the destructive potential of the brainless, consumption-driven organism they’ve discovered), The Blob is described by Paris Museum Of Natural History director Bruno David as “one of nature’s mysteries.”
Among the suite of alien features it possesses, David points out that “it has no brain but is able to learn,” sharing “knowledge to the other” when two separate blobs are brought together. “It behaves very surprisingly for something that looks like a mushroom,” he says. “It has the behavior of an animal, it is able to learn.”
We can only fall to our knees, begging for mercy, as we wait to discover what knowledge it will absorb into its brainless, eternally-hungry body next—and how The Blob will employ whatever it learns.
[via Reuters]
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