This single-celled organism is about to die. I recorded a VERY similar footage almost 4 years ago and it went viral. And just a couple of days ago, I found this one and it died in a very similar fashion.
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As she says in my favorite poem, “Dying is an art, like everything else”
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It’s a Blepharisma musculus, a cute, normally pinkish single-celled organism. Blepharisma are sensitive to light because the pink pigment granules oxidize so quickly with the light energy, and the chemical reaction melts the cell.
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When Blepharisma are living where they are regularly exposed to not-strong-enough-to-kill-them light, they lose their pinkish color over time. This one lived in a pond and then was in a jar on my desk under a lamp for a couple of weeks. So it lost its pink color, and because of the pigment loss, I thought it would survive my microscope’s light. But it didn’t and melted away to sadden me. Again, Blepharisma managed to prove to me how delicate life is.
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When I recorded the first dying Blepharisma like 4 years ago, I was having a really bad day and watching it die. It was like I was seeing my own life struggling, beating up my little arms and legs to survive but in the end everything was just particles, slowly drifting away on an empty canvas of a microscope slide. It made me cry and I wrote that I cried under my post, well, the internet called me a kitten (with a more vulgar word of choice). I upset the “manly-men” of the internet with my emotions, I am so glad for that because it’s kinda my favorite pastime activity. 😂
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Best,
James Weiss
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7 сен 2024
