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Bicosoeca -- flagellate in a wineglass

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



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Last post of 2012! Hope it was a good year for you all, and that the next will be even better -- Happy New Year! Some protists sitting in champagne glasses might be relevant to our interests:

Bicosoecids are non-photosynthetic relatives of brown algae. Usually nestled in a delicate lorica (but sometimes devoid of one), bicosoecids sit attached to a substrate with one flagellum, and wave around the other to bring in bacterial prey to devour. At the base of the flagella is a lip-like structure where the unfortunate prey get engulfed after travelling down the current. When startled, they rapidly withdraw their flagellum into a characteristic spiral, which you can see in the bottom specimen of the group. Most tend to be solitary, but this species forms loricate tree-like colonies, like wineglasses stacked upon each other. Despite their small size and timid appearance, their cell structure is fairly complicated and --hoping you'd agree with me -- quite elegant.

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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