Close enough: [ul][li] Chaos carolinensis[/li] [li] Chaos chaos[/li] [*] Chaos illinoisense[/ul]
[quote=“Polycarp, post:21, topic:473807”]
Close enough: [ul][li] Chaos carolinensis[/li] [li] Chaos chaos[/li] [li] Chaos illinoisense[/ul][/li][/QUOTE]
So Carolina is good and Illinois is evil? Are all 9 of the Outer Planes somewhere in the US?
The first page of GIS results for this creature is hilarious.
There don’t seem to be any pictures of the 5mm ones, though.
An unfertilized egg is a single cell, but I would not consider it to be an organism. A fertilized egg will be dividing and so has muliple cells.
What? Most cells are capable of dividing, but you still wouldn’t say they consist of more than one cell…
Paramecium is easily visible at 1/3 mm. I recall using a dropper to dump a couple back into my babyfood jar of pond water, then watching them twirl around as they swam for the bottom. A bit smaller than a grain of salt, but obviously oblong in shape.
On the other hand, if your illumination is bright enough, even something a couple thousand nanometers across will scatter light and be visible as a distinct bright speck.
Since no one has said this yet, the answer is billions and billions.
I think there’s a teleological point being made: the “purpose” of most organisms, whether single- or multi-celled, is to survive, feed, and sooner or later reproduce. (Obviously there is no real intent behind that “purpose” – it’s an anthropomorphic usage for “This is what these things do that make them successful organisms.”)
In contradistinction, a fertilized ovum’s main function is to subdivide in order to grow into a multi-cellular organism that will then do the above. It may at a given instant be a living single-celled organism, but it will not remain that way.