Why Is a Brain-Shaped Blob In Canada?

The magnificent bryozoan is a colonial organism that lives in warm ponds and lakes usually east of the Mississippi River. So what's it doing in western Canada?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
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

(00:22):
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

(00:43):
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

(01:10):
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

(01:34):
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

(01:54):
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,

(02:18):
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

(02:42):
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

(03:05):
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

(03:27):
this and other topics, please visit us at how stuff
works dot com.