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Protist-y art continued: the protist zodiac

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American


One night, when I was definitely completely sober in every way possible (of course!), it struck me that while both the European and Chinese zodiacs (ones I'm familiar with) display a nice variety of animals with and without backbones (I happen to be spineless according to the European one, and scaly and flame-breathing according to the Chinese version), somehow the ancients have missed out on a very major and obvious group -- the protists. How they managed to arrange an arbitrary representative for each of the 6-8 (or whatever) currently accepted supergroups is absolutely beyond me. They might have been busy laying the foundations for modern science and philosophy, perhaps, but that's hardly an excuse.

As usual, it falls upon myself to amend such cosmological oversights. But that's fine -- I've spent a huge chunk of my childhood creating fantasy cultures and mythologies studying hard and doing homework, so making stuff up is sort of my forte -- very useful in science. Adapting extant styles to your cultures is incredibly fun in itself, and seeing how various things can be seen in other ways. I'll begin with 8 -- one for each supergroup (slightly outdated now, but this isn't supposed to be a scientific reference). It's also a good number to fit with Buddhist motifs, as 4s and 8s are kind of central to their plot. Anyway, serendipitously, a friend happened to have  a couple books on Tibetan symbols and motifs lying about -- a deadly distraction. So I've been practicing and doodling a bit. These are mostly sketches; hopefully better versions will follow someday.

The first one is supposed to represent a microsporidian -- a highly reduced single-celled fungal parasite (with the smallest nuclear genome in all of Eukarya!). The flame is supposed to represent the awesomeness and/or terror of parasitism (depending on your view, I guess); the coil at the top is the polar tube, via which the parasite injects itself into unfortunate cells. On the bottom is an ever-so-slightly stylised nucleus.  We'll have this represent fungi for now.


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The euglyphid below was one of the first protist zodiac figures I've done. Euglyphids are scaly testate amoebae, with spines -- which are straight in nature, but why should I care? This will serve the Rhizaria (though I do want to do a foram too).

Then I doodled a haptophyte -- marine alga with elaborate calcium carbonate scales it builds and secretes. The thing at the top is a haptonema --  food is caught by it, aggregated into a ball, and once the ball of food is big enough... the haptonema reaches around and inserts it into the posterior end for phagocytosis. So a haptophyte eats with its ass. A tough topic to discuss with a straight face...

Unrelated to the zodiac, I've been reading about dileptid ciliates -- notable for wiggling about a trunk or proboscis loaded with miniature missiles; upon a brushing contact with prey, those missiles cause it to... explode. Then the dileptid drinks its cell juice. Why swallow your food when you can just blow it up? Further inspiration came from two facts: a) dileptids eat rotifers when they can (photgraphic evidence present in literature); and b) apparently the skinny base of the trunk in a regular dileptid was not enough for Paradileptus, who felt the need to construct a sizeable pouch around its mouth. Like a carnivorous version of a Basking shark, perhaps?

And here I was playing around with a new toy -- 9B graphite stick. Amoebae are hard/fun to shade (depending on how nice you expect it to look -- starting with low standards is advised.)

I definitely haven't abandoned the Pacific Northwest stylisation of protists either! Just very, very distracted, as always. Anyway, that's it for the progress update on the procrastinatory doodling front.

About Psi Wavefunction

I first encountered the wonders of the protist realm back in childhood, when a murky droplet of pond scum was revealed by the microscope to entail an alien world in its own right. It took another decade to discover there was a field and a community dedicated to these organisms, and I bade farewell to the study of more familiar big things. As a kid I was also fascinated by tales of exploration of the New World, as well as those of fantasy worlds. I was then sad that the age of surveying new landmasses on earth was over, and that human extraterrestrial adventures are unlikely to happen within our lifetimes. It seemed everything was discovered already. But that could hardly be further from the truth -- all that is necessary to begin one's own Age of Exploration is a new approach or perspective, and a healthy does of imagination. Since reality has conjured far more than the human mind alone ever could, science yields a way to write stories much wilder than fiction. All one needs to access the alien world of microbes around (and inside) them is a shift of scale by simple glass sphere.
I'm currently finishing up my undergraduate degree in Vancouver and in transition career-wise, hopefully to end up in graduate school soon. I was born in Russia (and speak the language) and spent most of my life in US and Canada. In addition to protists, I'm fascinated by evolution, including that of culture and languages, diversity and biology of cells and how they self-organise, linguistics and anthropology, particularly of the less talked-about cultures, sociology of science and plenty of totally random things that snag my attention.
Banner image was kindly post-processed and enhanced by my friend: an accomplished comic artist who goes by Achiru.

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