Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Hey, brain stuff, this is Christian Seger. 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 Zowan's. 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. Briozoans 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 Zonan, 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 Brian 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 tem pictures 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 Jescelyn Shields, produced by Dylan Fagan, and for more on this and other topics, please visit us at how stuff works dot com.