"THE SOPHISTICATED CILIATE"

 

Ciliate (Paramecium) in yeast

Photograph by Peter Parks

© 2001 by Image Quest 3-D
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Professor Niko Tinbergen, Oxford's first professor of animal behaviour - friend and mentor, taught my colleagues and I that every Herring Gull is different and recognisable by both his own kind and by students of behaviour.



Ciliates (Paramecium) in yeast

Photograph by Peter Parks

© 2001 by Image Quest 3-D
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The same goes for single celled animals, protozoa, like the ciliate Paramecium caudatum. Swarms a million strong appear to contain identical individuals. They are not. Every one is different and recognisable. Everyone is a complex machine of incredible complexity and few academic biologists know it. Paramecium has within its single cell of living tissue a digestive system almost as complex as our own and it can be elegantly demonstrated.



Ciliate (Paramecium) in yeast

Photograph by Peter Parks

© 2001 by Image Quest 3-D
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Equipped with a short, blind ended gullet, the cell wafts cellular and particulate material into this shallow funnel with its "buccal" cilia. At the inner end of the gullet is a tiny window of naked cytoplasm which, in amoeboid fashion, engulfs organic nutritional material within a food vacuole. The process is rapid and amongst abundant food, like yeast cells which it appears to relish, it may engulf up to a hundred or more cells at one "sitting". If these cells are previously stained with a universal pH indicator like "Congo Red" it is possible, elegantly to demonstrate that these food vacuoles are first subjected to acid digestion and then to alkali digestion. Acid conditions maintain the dye as red or orange. Alkali turns it first brown, then Prussian blue. We humans employ the same technique in our own acid stomach and alkali intestinal tracts. Furthermore, Paramecium can extract, in crystalline form, bright refractive storage products for later metabolic use. We store similar reserves as fat.

To use today's language……a smart cell!

This article was written by Peter Parks

© 2001 by Image Quest 3-D
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