Herd Of Fuzzy Green 'Glacier Mice' Baffles Scientists
"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.'"
In the 1950s, an Icelandic researcher described them in the Journal of Glaciology, noting that "rolling stones can gather moss." He called them "jökla-mýs" or "glacier mice."
"This new work adds to a very small body of research on these fuzz balls, even though glaciologists have long known about them and tend to be fond of them."