Herd-Like Movement Of Fuzzy Green 'Glacier Mice' Baffles Scientists
Moss balls seem to roll around glaciers in a coordinated way, and researchers can't explain why the whole group moves at about the same speeds and in the same directions.
In 2006, while hiking around the Root Glacier in Alaska to set up scientific instruments, researcher Tim Bartholomaus encountered something completely 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 pillow-like moss balls. In the journal , they that the balls can persist for years and move around in a coordinated, herd-like fashion that the researchers can not yet explain.
