This is a bit off to the side of this topic. But it is also related so I thought I would toss it in. I just found it fascinating.
It is from Dawkins' "The Ancestor's Tale" (about page 441)
He discusses the symbiotes that live in termites guts and digest cellulose for them.
Then he looks at (appropriately enough) Darwin's Termite(Mastotermes darwiniensis) and it's gut symbiote Mixotricha paradoxa. This is a "large protozoan about half a millimetre long or more".
Then this::
quote:
Mixotricha itself is a town. The full story was revealed by the work of L.R. Cleveland and A.V. Grimstone, but it especially the Amberican biolgist Lynn Margulis who has drawn our attention to Mixotrica's significance for evolution.
When J.L. Sutherland first examined Mixotricha in the early 1930's she saw two kinds of 'hairs' waving on its surface. It is almost completely carpeted by thousands of tiny hairs, beating to and fro. She also saw a few very long, thin, whip-like structures at the front end. Both seemed familair to her, the small ones as 'cilia', the large as 'flagella'. Cilia are common in animal cells, ....Another recognized group of protozoans, the flagellates, have much longer, whip like 'flagella' ...
Mixotricha, or so it seemed to Sutherland, has both cilia and flagella. It violates protozoological protocol. .... or so it seemed.
(note from Ned -- none of the protozoans have BOTH).
As it has turned out, Mixotricha's 'cilia' are even more unexpected than Sutherland realized, and they don't violate precident in the way she feared. ...
they demonstarted with the electron microscope that the 'cilia' are not cilia at all. They are bacteria. Each one of the hundreds of thousands of tiny hairs is a single spirochaete-- a bacterium whose entire body is a long, wiggling hair. ...
but Mixotricha's sirochaetes are stuck to its body wall, exactly as though they were cilia.
The don't move like cilia however, they move like spirochaetes. ...Amazingly, they seem to be co ordinated with each other, moving in waves that begin at the front of the body ...
It goes on to discuss the oher separate bacteria that make up part of Mixotricha. It is almost worth the cost of the book to read about this one critter.
I do btw recommend the book. Interesting read, clearly presented.
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