Welcome to brain Stuff production of iHeart Radio. Hi brain Stuff. Lauren bog Obam here with another classic episode from our previous host, Christian Sager. This one is about a particularly strange type of tiny creature and almost microscopic invertebrate that forms up into relatively huge colonies that look like big old mossy brains. I'll let Christian explain, Hey, brain Stuff,
this is Christian Sager. Lagoons are famous for creepy swamp creatures, but in a Canadian park in Vancouver, British Columbia, scientists have found something possibly just as outlandish, A slimy, gelatinous brain blob. Well, okay, it's not really a brain, and it's not really even an it. It's a collection of tiny creatures collectively called a magnificent brio zoan, or also known by its Latin name as Pectinatella magnifica. This colony forms a brain shaped mass that can grow to be
larger than a human head. And I think we can all agree that's also really weird. Now. Brian Zoans sometimes they're also called moss animals. They're an ancient group of filter feeders. The earliest fossil evidence of one of these colonies can be dated back about four hundred and seventy million years. Individually, each tiny invertebrate, called a zooid, can just barely be seen with the naked eye. It's only about half a millimeter or about point zero two inches long.
But when hundreds of them assemble, they can glue themselves together with a special protein to form all sorts of shapes, sheets, columns, and even branched tree like structures. Now actually fossilized. Brio Zoans are among the world's most abundant fossils as well, and you can find them in rocks originating more than four hundred and fifty million years ago up until the present. Their colonies start with a single zooid, which a sexually reproduces until it's got an entire army of clones to
hang out with. Most briozoan species live in marine habitats, but the one found in Vancouver's Stanley Park belongs in freshwater.
It just doesn't really belong in Vancouver, Canada. This August, the Stanley Park Ecology Society held its annual bio Blitz, a community event in which citizens scientists survey the park, identifying hundreds of organisms in twenty four hours in the Lost Lagoon, which is the park's biofiltration pond, Blitz goers discovered the giant, slimy football shaped brio zoan thousands of
miles from home. Their usual range is decidedly to the south of Canada and east of the Mississippi River, and it turns out this isn't the first time a magnificent brow zone has been found in this part of Canada, and nobody can tell whether they're staying either, but why they're there is a different question. Like with most migrating organisms these days, warming global temperatures might have opened the door of the Great White North to these probably ecologically
harmless blobs. They need a water temperature warmer than sixty degrees fahrenheit or sixteen degrees celsius in order to make a go of it. Today's episode was written by Jesslin Shields and produced by Dylan Fagan and Tyler Klang. For more on this and lots of other curious topics, visit how stuff works dot com. Brain Stuff has production off i Heart Radio four more podcasts. For my heart Radio, visit the heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,