None of the reports I’ve read indicate that this wee beastie is the only macroscopic single-celled being, but I’ve never heard of any others. How many are there? What is the largest single-celled being?
Note: I don’t care about things that are single-celled only in that they are made up of billions or trillions of single cells. I know about slime molds, mosses, lichens, ferns, and Bill Gates. I even know about gigantic things growing under the surface of the Pacific Northwest. I don’t care if they are formed of loose collections of single cells, either: This thread is about single-celled beings that themselves can be seen with the unaided (human) eye.
There’s a type of algae that is single celled but quite large; I found a mention of it growing to 10 meters in size. It has many cell nuclei, but no internal cell walls.
Bah. How come I didn’t predict the existence of things with multiple nuclei but no internal cell walls? I know: Because I’m not absolutely nuts!
OK, I guess both that and Chaos are out, despite the fact Chaos (Seriously? Are all microbiologists D&D fans?) will now haunt my dreams.
Looked like Steve Ballmer.
This qualifies and is really cool. One nucleus == one cell, unless there is no nucleus at all. (Do any prokaryotes get this big?) Even biologists apparently call the multi-nucleus monsters ‘acellular’.
Why do most of these articles not have a picture, considering the size of the organism is the interesting feature? Especially a picture with a size reference? And not a little legend, but a dime or something? Sigh. Scientists are bad at people.
Bah! I forgot that eggs technically qualify as single cell. OK, the biggest current egg has been mentioned. Let’s not list off dinosaur eggs or what blue whales produce when they menstruate, OK?
I’m confused by the article linked to in the OP. It seems to be saying the featured organism is an amazing new discovery that should change the way we understand the precambrian era. But then it says at the very end that they already knew about this organism, and what’s new is just that they found it in the Bahamas. And in this thread, we’re seeing that people have known about other, similarly huge single-cellers for a while. So what’s with the hype in the article?
It’s because we used to think only worms could have left the kinds of fossil tracks we’ve seen in really old rocks. Now that we know really big single-celled beings could have, it revises what we thought we knew about life back then.
You know your skeletal muscle cells have multiple nuclei, right?
Squid giant axons are huge…compared to other axons, that is. They are between 0.5 and 1mm wide. The funny thing is, we usually associate nerves are conduction information very fast, using electrical signals and all. But the squid axon in unmyelinated, and has a conduction velocity of only 25m/s.
While we’re at it, human ova are also barely visible to the naked eye, if you’ve got sharp vision. “Naked-eye visible” is not as strict a criterion as you might think.
