Why the hyperbole? Science has known multiple plant movement mechanisms. They will follow sunlight, mineral content and even their equivalent of pheromones.
Looks freaky though. :)
Looks freaky though. :)
> "We still don't know," he says. "I'm still kind of baffled."
Science doesn't yet know which motive mechanism these use (they might even use something novel), and that's really cool.
>The researchers considered several possible explanations. The first, and most obvious one, is that they just rolled downhill. But measurements showed that the moss balls weren't going down a slope.
"We next thought maybe the wind is sort of blowing them in consistent directions," says Bartholomaus, "and so we measured the dominant direction of the wind."
That didn't explain it either, nor did the pattern of the sunlight.
"We still don't know," he says. "I'm still kind of baffled."
"It's always kind of exciting, though, when things don't comply with your hypothesis, with the way you think things work," says Gilbert.
The work has charmed other glacier scientists who dote on the adorable moss balls.
"I think that probably the explanation is somewhere in the physics of the energy and the heat around the surface of the glacier, but we haven't quite got there yet," says Ruth Mottram, a climate scientist at the Danish Meteorological Institute.
Besides growth, their center of mass may also shift when one side becomes damper or dryer faster than the rest, due to sunlight, wind, or the wet ground.