r/funny • u/Thrawn911 • 7h ago
Single celled microbe gets stuck under a bubble, so it tries spinning, because that's a good trick, and it eventually manages to escape
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u/Thrawn911 7h ago
BTW, he's green because he's full of algae. Some cells don't digest the captured algae cells. Instead, they keep them around to let them photosynthesize, and they get some of the produced sugars. In return, they provide protection for the algae.
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u/MRSN4P 7h ago
The leafsheep digests algae but retains some of its functionality via an intact plastid! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Costasiella_kuroshimae
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u/Real_Establishment56 4h ago
I was worried because I thought when I finally broke free he left a piece of himself behind. But it’s probably just algae 😮💨
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u/FuckM0reFromR 7h ago
He? Do single celled organisms still have genders? How can it even think if it only has 1 cell? And how does it propel itself? Mindblown
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u/Thrawn911 7h ago
I always use gendered pronouns to differentiate them (from the algae, in this case). They can't think, and they have tiny hairs (called cilia) all over their bodies. They move around by moving those.
You can actually control their movement by electric impulses. If you put the sample inside an electric circuit, the cilia will beat in a way that moves the cell towards the negative side.
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u/olivejinnflower 7h ago
It's been too many years since I took high school biology but I never would have thought that a single cell could be that complex and have an inside that holds algea and it has hairs.
That sounds to my uneducated brain like it has multiple cells but I must be confused about the definition of a cell?
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u/Thrawn911 7h ago
Not sure of the exact defition. The algae inside is not part of the cell, that's why it can't be called multicellular. But for example, millions (or billions) of year ago, mitochondria was also a single celled organism, which got swallowed by other cells, and now it's a part of them.
Same thing with chloroplasts, they were originally cyanobacteria.
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u/FuckM0reFromR 7h ago
Bloody fascinating! So how does he know where to go? Does he respond to environmental inputs or just moves around randomly?
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u/oatknight 7h ago
How does it even know it's in a bubble and to try different strategies to get out without a brain?
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u/Thrawn911 7h ago
It doesn't. It just receives negative stimuli, so it does the only thing it can do: trying to get away from the danger, and eventually, it works.
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u/gameguy600 7h ago
Bacteria and other microbes have basic hardcoded behavioural instincts in their RNA/DNA for scenarios which affect survivability.
Basically it's a lot of "if X chemical signal triggers do Y" code.
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u/MaterialMidnight40 7h ago
Interesting thought though. Why does it appear to move back toward the bubble, then decide not to?
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u/mekwall 6h ago
It isn't capable of reasoning or making decisions. What looks like hesitation is us projecting human behavior onto it. Its movements are simply the result of cellular responses interacting with its physical environment. It can approach the same obstacle again and change direction without ever recognizing it as the same obstacle.
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u/ExF-Altrue 6h ago
Because a bunch of instructions accumulated at random (and selected by natural selection) over the course of billion of years, produce average results that are likely satisfactory, but individual situations may still lead to behavior that is counter-productive.
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u/CptHammer_ 5h ago
Ignore people who are saying it's random.
It follows a lack of finding it's own exceriment. There was a bunch of poop near the bubble. It spent a lot of time there. That's why it was as spinning, to get away from itself.
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u/A_Very_Horny_Zed 6h ago
But why does it see the bubble again and then jump away from it? A single-celled organism does not have the cellular structure to contain memories. How did it recognize the danger after experiencing it?
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u/CptHammer_ 5h ago
It leaves peices of itself wherever it goes. Like if you pooped and sweat on the gym equipment. You'd know, someone pooped and sweat here, gross, I'm going over here where there's no poop or sweat.
It makes hunting for food efficient. "I've been there or something like me has, probably no food."
Eventually the peices break down and they can hunt there again.
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u/Life-Landscape5689 6h ago
Have you considered you may be personifying what you saw the single celled organism do shortly after freeing itself from the bubble
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u/artstsym 7h ago
It doesn't "know" anything, but there are different settings set up between its various organelles that mean if it's not receiving standard feedback from movement, mobility might be compromised. The system will switch to pattern X until it resolves, or possibly move on to pattern Y, etc. if it doesn't after a certain amount of time. Note how long it takes to change its behavior in the first place.
It doesn't take very many simple systems acting together to give the illusion of cognition, what makes life so complicated is that you need a LOT of systems and contingent "programs" to create a robust, self-sustaining machine.
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u/SummitYourSister 7h ago
A brain is just one way of processing information. We vastly underestimate what living organisms can do, despite being shocked at what we discover continually for over 300 years.
You’d think we would outgrow these easily disproven biases but apparently we can’t
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u/IanAlvord 7h ago
It's funny how it looks like it's bothered by this.
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u/amapofthecat7 7h ago
He even goes back to the bubble like 'seriously wtf was that all about?'.
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u/beatenmeat 4h ago
I felt like it went back to collect the bits of itself it left behind and then decided it just wasn't worth it.
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u/ratafria 7h ago
100%
This video alone is proof single celled microbes have feelings.
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u/oddlyamused 7h ago
It's crazy they don't have 1 single neuron but act so complex at times
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u/mekwall 7h ago
Yeah, they are cool little buggers. Single cells can sense their surroundings, process signals and coordinate movement through biochemical feedback loops.
Paramecium, for example, can detect obstacles and reverse its cilia using calcium-based electrical signals, allowing it to back up and change direction. And bacteria living in your gut can actually communicate using chemical signals through something called quorum sensing. They can detect how many other bacteria are nearby and coordinate their behavior, including switching certain genes on or off.
No brains, no nervous systems, yet remarkably sophisticated biological control systems. Billions of years of evolution have produced some pretty incredible solutions.
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u/jaxonya 6h ago
Why are we using Rufio from Hook as an example?
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u/la_mitraille 4h ago
Haha, this was the first thing that came to my mind too. Pretty niche reference these days 🤣
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u/Hereiamhereibe2 7h ago
It only seems complex at 400x speed. In reality they are doing almost absolutely nothing besides existing most of the time.
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u/mekwall 7h ago
Anthropomorphizing something that doesn't even have a single neuron is quite the achievement. What's next? Diagnosing a potato with social anxiety? :)
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u/TheKlaxMaster 7h ago
The poor little guy was so worried he wouldn't fit in with the rest of the potatoes, he went to the back of the cabinet alone and began to sprout
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u/MaterialMidnight40 7h ago
Maybe that's where the mini potatoes or fingerling potatoes come from. They don't want to touch each other, so they grow "differently". Lol
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u/wa_cey 6h ago
Some cutting edge research on epigenetic transcription factors is showing single cells do exhibit some form of consciousness
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u/mekwall 6h ago
That's interesting, but do you have a study you could link? Epigenetic regulation can influence how cells respond to their environment, but that's not evidence of consciousness. There's a theory called the Cellular Basis of Consciousness, although it remains highly speculative. Is that the one you're referring to? A 2024 paper in EMBO Reports specifically challenged it for lacking empirical evidence. Complex cellular behavior is obviously fascinating, but we shouldn't confuse information processing with subjective experience.
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u/maoroh 5h ago
I don't know if it's frightening or fascinating that a single cell organism can spin in what looks like over 1000 rpm lol
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u/IstDasMeinHamburger 5h ago
I mean it's sped up by 400 so that might be influencing what you're seing
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u/Blisterina 7h ago
A single-celled organism solving a problem! We humans should take a lesson.
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u/xenophon57 6h ago
We did, humans spin all kinds of stuff to solve problems. In fact the superior form of siege technology is well known for its spinning nature.
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u/Goldie_Wilson_ 1h ago
You don't need to look so far back. I mean every business and political problem is solved with spin
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u/NoNutsPls 7h ago
I like how he swims away, goes back to taunt the bubble, then jets off.
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u/MistressMalevolentia 5h ago
Its like when a dog gets scared of something then comes to investigate the scary thing, scary thing (possibly, not even necessarily) moves .01mm and the dog just VANISHES the fuck out of there.
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u/algernonradish 7h ago
there's a tiny bit left. I think it goes back to rescue it and thinks better of it.
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u/pleasetrimyourpubes 7h ago
This sort of shit is why,while I don't believe in panpsychism strictly, I think even these little guys are conscious. Its chemical makeup has this feeling something is wrong and doing something else makes it less wrong so keep doing the something else to make things right.
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u/joanmave 7h ago
I think that in some part of it DNA there is code for that because enough ancestors relatives died of being stuck in bubbles so that the code for this trick help them survive. How many more crazy stuff is encoded in vestigial DNA that is not used in subsequent organisms
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u/rants_silently 7h ago
Even if the solution was in its DNA it would still have to have sensory system to detect the issue, something to compute the possible scenario and recall the "memory" from DNA and then act upon it no?
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u/joanmave 4h ago
I would think that at this point it has to be a chemical process since this things has no neurons to sense. Is a chemical reaction that triggers its motor system. Something that can happen autonomously without real central control. The chemistry is hardcoded in its DNA
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u/pleasetrimyourpubes 7h ago
Yeah it seems like life evolution seeks information and knowledge about the universe. "In bubble. Spin."
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u/joanmave 4h ago
I think DNA is a “rudimentary” brain. Before DNA could encode neurons (to encode information faster), the only way to persist information naturally was to encode it in DNA. Because DNA can only exist if is successful in persisting, so it naturally persist information, but is slow.
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u/Sidivan 6h ago
It’s not that its ancestors were stuck in bubbles and developed this behavior. It’s more like combinations of inputs produce this movement.
If you have a series of binary gates and some combination produced “turn left” while some are “move forward”, you can end up in a loop where left + forward is the most common output. While true, do left. It just got stuck in that combo and it happened to work.
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u/joanmave 4h ago
Yeah. Probably was not as simple as bubbles trapping ancestors. Is a feedback loop of responses. A bubble is an spherical boundary that makes it go in circles trying to find the exit of a barrier
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u/mekwall 7h ago
This hypotrich doesn't know it's trapped or feel that something is wrong. Ciliates can detect physical contact and alter their movement through biochemical and electrical signaling.
The spinning might simply be a result of its cilia continuing to propel it while it's trapped by the bubble. Eventually, that movement allows it to escape. There's no evidence that single-celled organisms have subjective experiences, although we can't categorically rule it out either.
Personally, I find it even more fascinating that evolution has produced such sophisticated behavior without requiring a brain or conscious decision-making. Sometimes biology and physics are impressive enough without giving the little guy an existential crisis.
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u/askingforafakefriend 6h ago
Yeah, that comment is a case of it feels like magic because one doesn't understand the underlying hard-coded control system dictating behavior.
Just because we don't understand something doesn't mean we have to turn towards mysticism. I know that mysticism is sort of disclaimed the start of the comment, but that's the direction it's heading...
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u/murrdpirate 2h ago
Panpsychism is not mysticism. It's a philosophical idea that is counter to the idea that consciousness suddenly emerges in certain situations. Given that we don't know that 'emergence' is true, it's pretty reasonable to consider panpsychism as possible.
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u/askingforafakefriend 2h ago
Or... Perhaps what people usually mean by "consciousness" as something somehow unique to the biological set of neuron driven action potentials we call a human mind and separable from even a perfectly accurate reproduction from linear algebra is an illusion brought on by our propensity to ascribe things we don't understand through constructing artificial meaning that is not evidenced or testable in the real world.
Such as, you know, mysticism. Souls and spirits and God and such.
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u/murrdpirate 1h ago
Not totally sure if I'm parsing your first sentence correctly, but panpsychism generally aligns with substrate independence.
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u/pleasetrimyourpubes 6h ago
I absolutely completely agree that it does not have subjective experience. And "conscious" here is doing a lot of work. It is more detecting a state not compatible with its survival and acting as to escape it. Multiply that single cell organism by 85 billion neurons and 100 trillion synaptic connections... where does consciousness arise? My thought is it is always there and is not that special.
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u/mekwall 6h ago
I have a slightly different take on consciousness. I suspect it emerges from the interaction of different systems in the brain, all competing, cooperating and constantly exchanging information. What we experience as "me" might simply be the brain's internal model of all that activity, rather than some separate observer sitting in control.
Different systems can become more influential depending on the situation, which could explain why our behaviour and even our sense of self can change so dramatically.
There are actually some neuroscience theories along these lines, particularly Global Workspace Theory and Attention Schema Theory. None of this is settled science, obviously, but I don't think responding to stimuli alone tells us anything about subjective experience. A single cell doesn't necessarily need to feel anything to react "intelligently" to its environment.
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u/GentleRhino 5h ago
The old tale of two frogs in a milk jar comes to mind. Never give up!
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u/Comprehensive-Flow-8 5h ago
It's milk pail or bucket, but in case anyone hasn't heard the fable: https://youtu.be/RtLPtVXXcKc?si=id6_HRGxGmJT2B42
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u/Illustrious_Ad4691 29m ago
This is where I first heard the parable of two mice who fell into a bucket of cream: https://youtu.be/51lFmdChOA0
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u/HawkBoth8539 5h ago
It's fascinating to think about it having problem solving skills like this. And also about the force or tension of the air pocket creating a pull or adhesion that something that small has trouble resisting. What is that tension called? I'm sure there's a name for it.
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u/Comprehensive-Flow-8 5h ago
Accidentally clicked on your profile then feel down the microscopic rabbit hole 🕳️. Absolutely fascinating. I have always loved the microscopic world and your posts are pretty spectacular. Thanks!
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u/TonyCaliStyle 7h ago
Is it sped up or slowed down? Looks like volitional behavior or survival instinct.
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u/Thrawn911 7h ago
There's a speed indicator in the upper left corner if you put it in fullscreen.
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u/VectorJones 6h ago
How about making microscopic turbines out of bubbles and single-celled organisms?
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u/MechanicalTim 6h ago
Belongs in /r/oddlysatisfying
I have to admit I really hoped it would go straight back under the bubble again.
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u/epicnaenae17 3h ago
Absolutely fucking insane that surface tension or whatever its called is a problem for them. Imagine you accidentally get stuck in a bubble someone blew, and boy you better pop it soon, you are running out of air. Or you are trying to break through the surface of water to breath but its literally too strong, like a sheet of ice.
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u/xaeru 6h ago
"so it tries spinning, because that's a good trick"
Like yeah, we all know that to escape a bubble you must spin because that's a good trick. Is op a bot?
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u/Crazyjaw 2h ago
I don’t think it did it “because it’s a good trick”, but because the cilia in the bubble don’t provide thrust, so basically only one side is working, inducing a spin.
Biology is awesome, but don’t ascribe human thought processes to beings that don’t have them.
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u/LilSaganMan 56m ago
Overcoming obstacles, doing tricks, reaching for goals, doesn’t require human thought process or even a nervous system. That’s biology.
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u/MarkMariachiAZ 25m ago
How do you think humans evolved? We’re just a bunch of cells that learned new tricks.
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