The Terrifying Lives and Times of the Tiny
Why it’s great to be one of the biggest things on the planet.
Among our many defenses against getting eaten, we humans have one that stands above all others. We’re freaking huge. The number of organisms that could ever take us on in a fight is statistically a rounding error, and that’s be…
Bears are not a rounding error! They’re huge!
Oh no… you again?
You’re basically stuck with me, so deal with it. Besides, people like me and you don’t want to seem rude, do you?
Heaven forbid one of us is rude.
Exactly.
I hate that you’re immune to sarcasm.
I know. That’s part of why I love you. Don’t ever change.
… anyway…
Let’s talk about bears!
Bears are tiny?
I like bears.
I know you do, but I’m here to talk about … kind of the opposite of bears.
Gummi Bears?
Way, way smaller.
You’re a sizeist.
That’s nature, not me. I know you’re an arachnophobe, but that octokitten is not just going to try to eat you because you …
I wish you’d stop calling them that. They’re not kittens.
And yes, I’m pretty sure that jumping spider was going to try to inject me with venom and eat me. It was looking at me. And waving it’s…mustache?
I’m trying to talk about something here. And I’m not going to explain what it was waving at you.
Besides, what did you think it was planning to do with you? Try to detach a toe and hope you won’t notice?
…yes?
No. That was not going to happen. That has never happened.
It might!
*sigh*
Anyway, this time we’re going smaller but sticking with the combatants and the predators. They get super awesomely weird.
Why?
For the tiny, life is often just eating everybody you can eat as fast as possible hoping to grow up and have babies before somebody eats you…more often than not on accident while they’re eating somebody else.
They’re in a constant struggle for survival, having hundreds or millions or more generations of evolution in the time it takes us to read a book.
And their weapons and defenses are amazing.
How amazing? Like Pokemon amazing?
Pokemon have like four moves each. Trust me, they’re boring compared to the real things.
Let’s start off with a perennial favorite, shall we?
Meet Euplotidium, or as the delightful Elio Schaechter of Small Things Considered anoints him (yes, we’re going to anthropomorphize a lot here!), Ciliate 007
What…is…that?
Well, that bit to the left is the cilia that draw tinier critters into their mouths (Imagine if you had facial hair that could create a wind that blows food into your mouth, but more useful). Those things that look kind of like legs made of spaghetti are basically…well… legs.
Legs?
Yeah, It’s a single celled organism with feet! How cool is that? They can really book around on them too, often looking for food to eat, often running away from something scary.
I don’t see any great videos of them on line, but here’s a really close relative.
It’s kind of cute, actually.
They also have a pretty solid armored shell there too. They’re not squishy. They can even change the shape of their shells, forming big ‘wings’ to make them too big to swallow when they sense the right predator about.
What are those little rows of thingies on the shell in the picture?
Those? Those are the best part. They’re the failsafe.
I’m not going to read the article right now. I don’t think most of those words are in human. Explain the pictures.
Okay, so what you’re looking at are epixenosomes, and …
…and I’m going to stop you right here. Not helpful.
Sigh
You won’t even meet me halfway, will you?
Nah, less fun that way.
Okay, let’s try this. Now, keep in mind that this isn’t actually how evolution works, I’m just trying to make this accessible.
A long time ago a hypo… a mustachioed squirrel-eating turbo turtle… went up to some bacteria and said ‘hey, I’ll let you guys live in little spots on my back and take care of you as long as all the adults will commit suicide and turn me into a porcupine-tank when I need it!’
Better. And they agreed?
Bacteria aren’t all that smart, and it’s actually a pretty good arrangement. It’s kind of like if you talked a bunch of worms into living in the skin of your back in exchange for turning into suicide spears on command, as long as you keep the wormlings safe.
Why??? Why would I do that? Why would you even suggest such a thing?
Well, you don’t have to deal with monsters like this all the time…
That’s…okay, that’s worse than a bear.
This is what litonotus does to those who aren’t aren’t overly prepared. Or just bigger and scarier.
It’s like a stinging jellycarpet that hugs you into it’s mouth? That’s just freaky!
That’s better than my description, so we’ll roll with it.
Anything else like that?
Well, there’s nothing quite like litonotus, but that’s kind of something you think a lot when learning about these guys.
Why do a lot of those guys kind of just bounce around all the time?
Well, at their scale they just don’t have the same senses than we do. There’s no brain to process things, for most unicellular organisms the best they can hope for vision wise is light sensing spots, there’s a lot of sensing chemical gradients and…
The best most of them can hope for?
There’s an amazing amount of originality, even the grizzled veterans can blown away as we discover more things about (for example) a dinoflagellate that has something suspiciously close to an eye. That’s them on the left, a vertebrate eye is on the right.
Don’t need your help this time. Ooh, hey, They don’t have to deal with a optic nerve getting in the way!
Pretty impressive for something that’s basically less than a nerve.
Okay, now that’s getting freaky again. Do they need it to avoid some predator?
For them it’s more likely just to help them find optimal light condit…
Bored now. More violence!
That’s okay, I was just kidding, they very possibly use it to aim their little spear-on-a-piston attack.
There are a couple more that you’ll obviously like if you like litonotus. Lacrymaria and dileptus both probably fit the bill. Dileptus is the one that has the weird tentacle sex and lacrymaria is the one that’s mostly tentacle.
[…]
err..still there?
Hush. Watching tiny horror movies. You wouldn’t believe some of the things Youtube’s recommending now!
Okay, I’ll be around.
— time passes —
Done now. You may continue
You’re too kind. Okay, let’s see what else we have. I suppose there’s always your classic amoeba, like proteus or chaos, those guys can be little monsters.
Ooh, the ones like the blob?
Yup! Those guys!
Yes, please.
They’re way cleverer (anthropomorphizing clever, of course) than you’d think, and we really don’t know how they do what they do. Many of them adopt a wide array of tactics when eating, everything from reaching just far enough around something that it doesn’t notice them to forming special structures and just grabbing on to you so hard you can’t get away without your skin ripping off.
Eeew! Also, neat.
Their solution to finding you too big to fit in their bellies is to take as much of you as they can fit and then go their merry way.
They’re kind of like very casual sharks.
Sometimes it’s not them cutting YOU in half, sometimes your only hope is that you can escape with your top bits mostly intact while you watch the amoeba eat the rest of you.
Whoa
Do they ever eat anything..smaller than them?
Oh yeah, lots of times! They’ll nom up euglenids (the guys you hear about a lot when discussing the evolution of the eye) as fast as they can digest them.
And some very special species can even be trained to hunt bacteria!
Trained?
Technically no, yet at the same time colloquially yes. Like these guys!
And where does one find those?
Inside you. That’s a white blood cell!
That’s basically a tiny baby clone of yourself that you made inside your own body and told to be an amoeba.
Oh yeah, I already knew that. I just hadn’t thought of it that way. All of our cells are little tiny us-clones, aren’t they?
Yup. You’re a bit like a huge evil ant queen made out of ants.
I am not Evil!
Then why did you capitalize it like that?
Shut up. Give me more violence. Not inside my body this time! I don’t care if it’s a tiny baby me…
…that will never get a chance to grow old and is doomed to die before his prime?. Does it help if I describe them more like suicide clone robots?
No. Why can’t they live a long, fruitful life inside me?
Ever hear of cancer? That’s what happens when one of those guys goes rogue and tries to have more babies than the law allows. You suddenly have a furiously multiplying clone of yourself confused and fighting to survive and you have all the plans to all your body’s defenses tucked away inside each of you.
It’s even worse if you start invading other people, like that dog did.
You haven’t heard of Cloney, the Tiniest Puppy?
I have no idea, you sometimes give strange names to things.
Hold on, I’m going to look.
[…]
Okay, I’m now a little disturbed, but I want Battles, not stories!
Okay, give me a sec here, I didn’t expect you to be this demanding!
Oh! Coleps! How’d I forget Coleps?
Did that thing just…
Yes.
It was kind of like if you were having sexy times with somebody, and something came up and hit them so hard that they basically popped, but you were able to escape with their genitals stuck to you while they ate what was left of your former (and technically current) lover.
Why did you have to describe it like that?
Hey, it’s better that and you get away then you don’t leave a big meal behind and they eventually find you and swarm you.
You are not making things better. Why do they spin funny like that?
Oh! They’ve got spiky points on the ends of their shells. They’re kind of like those drill bits they use to make the holes for doorknobs, except if the drill then ate whatever was on the other side of the door.
They’re certainly not above swarming something larger. I’ve heard them called pirhanas and jackals. Except of course their front end more typical of something somebody has made up entirely
Okay, I’ve got plenty of videos to watch now. What other awful things happen to tiny things?
Well, you might not get eaten at all because instead you got infected by a parasitic fungus.
They can do that? Like mushrooms?
Yeah, it’s a hard life being small. There are fungi that trap nematodes, and even fungi that chase after their prey.
That’s just wrong.
Tell it to the fungus.
It’s not the worst thing that can happen, it’s not like something made a huge gun, crawled into it, and then shot itself into you so it could eat you alive from the inside.
That can’t even be close to real.
Meet Haptoglossia
Psi Wavefunction has a great writeup on them over on Skeptic Wonder.
It’s hard to invent something that’s more disturbing than what nature’s already come up with.
