I must admit I was fascinated by the term glacier mice:
In 2006, while hiking around the Root Glacier in Alaska to set up scientific instruments, researcher Tim Bartholomaus encountered something unexpected.
“What the heck is this!” Bartholomaus recalls thinking. He’s a glaciologist at the University of Idaho.
Scattered across the glacier were balls of moss. “They’re not attached to anything and they’re just resting there on ice,” he says. “They’re bright green in a world of white.”
Intrigued, he and two colleagues set out to study these strange moss balls. In the journal Polar Biology, they report that the balls can persist for years and move around in a coordinated, herdlike fashion that the researchers can not yet explain.
“The whole colony of moss balls, this whole grouping, moves at about the same speeds and in the same directions,” Bartholomaus says. “Those speeds and directions can change over the course of weeks.” [NPR]
But it seems to me that this is more than just another curiosity:
Each ball is like a soft, wet, squishy pillow of moss. The balls can be composed of different moss species and are thought to form around some kind of impurity, like a bit of dust. They’ve been seen in Alaska, Iceland, Svalbard and South America, although they won’t grow on just any glacier — it seems that conditions have to be just right.
Conceptually, this doesn’t seem to differ much from a collection of cells that makes up a multicellular organism. I wonder how far we could push the analogy. Perhaps it falls apart when we note that the various mosses, in more congenial environments, can live separate from the others, while could cells? I’m not enough of a biologist to really have an informed opinion.
And, while it’s probably more a matter of external physics than a shared internal set of rules that flocks of birds use, measurements of their movements was also fascinating:
The movement of the moss balls was peculiar. The researchers had expected that the balls would travel around randomly by rolling off their ice pedestals. The reality was different. The balls moved about an average of an inch a day in a kind of choreographed formation — like a flock of birds or a herd of wildebeests.
“When we visited them all, they were all just sort of moving relatively slowly and initially toward the south,” says Bartholomaus. “Then they all started to speed up and kind of start to deviate toward the west. And then they slowed down again and progressed even farther to the west.”
I’m easily suggestible, aren’t I? But I think that’s just so cool.
