Scientists tied friendship bracelets on 30 balls of moss and tracked them for years. The herd moves together, and nobody can explain it.

They’re called glacier mice. Balls of moss, roughly hamster-sized, that grow around a speck of grit and lie around loose on the bare ice of certain glaciers. No roots, no legs, no brain. The name is official: Icelandic meteorologist Jón Eyþórsson described them in a 1951 letter to the Journal of Glaciology as “jökla-mýs”, glacier mice, and signed off with “you will have noted, Sir, that rolling stones can gather moss.” Researchers have been apologizing for the name ever since.

Here’s the strange part about their biology: they can’t stop moving. The moss on the underside gets no light, so a parked ball starts dying from the bottom. The ice cooperates, each ball insulates its own patch, ends up perched on a little melt pedestal, and eventually tips off and rolls. A built-in treadmill.

The researchers are on record as being fine with not fully knowing

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