When I imagine life on Earth, I think of grand images: springboks bouncing across the African savanna, penguins waddling in the snow, dolphins leaping into the air, redwood trees soaring above the forest. But scientists are exploring a profusion of creatures with equally fascinating behavior that aren’t seen in David Attenborough–style documentaries. In fact, our eyes can’t see them at all.
Minuscule life-forms known as protists have been known for centuries. But powerful microscopes, advances in genetic and computational technologies, and old-fashioned fieldwork are now revealing extensive diversity among these single-celled life-forms. Many are bizarre enough to star in a science fiction series. As life sciences writer Susan Milius reports, one critter has a “head” that spins, a skill creepy enough that its discoverers gave it the name Daimonympha friedkini, inspired by the demonically possessed child in the 1973 film The Exorcist and its director, William Friedkin. Another creature, shaped like a flying saucer, glides into the bodies of its prey, devouring them from the inside.
These two discoveries and many other recent ones are forcing scientists to rethink their concepts of how microbes are related to other organisms, as well as to rethink the whole tree of life. “What struck me most as I worked on the story was how little of it I can see,” Milius said of the tree of life and its many microbial branches. That and the fact that it’s not so much a tree as invisible bramble tangles of life, Milius says.
Trying to figure out how to illustrate the protists in the bramble tangles proved a challenge. Science News design director Tracee Tibbitts spent many hours digging through electron microscope images in search of the right tiny, crazy-looking things. “Species ID is a recurring theme at Science News,” Tibbitts told me. “This took it to another level.”
And even when she found the right species, the images often didn’t…
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