This Microbe Hasn't Been Seen Since The 1930s 

So.... we have just witnessed a very unique event in the history of Microcosmos? Something that wasn't found for 90 years?

considering the folks who found it last time are probably all dead by now, who's to say it's wrong? ;)

It sounds exactly as it should, Hank, no worries

"bri" - "off" - "uh" - "lum"

Bryophyllum ("sprout leaf,") is remarkably similar to bryophyte (nonvascular plants such as mosses) which is pronounced (bri-like-Brian) "Bri uh fight." Presumably bryophyllum is "Bri OFF fill 'em," based on accepted pronunciation of similar word forms. 🤷🤔🤷🤔🤷🤔

I think this happens a lot with many things.. I imagine lots of fossils and artifact just get bulldozed over or destroyed, Interesting space phenomena go unwitnessed, deep sea creatures stay clear of the massive lights of submersibles, unknown and rare bug species just getting cleaned off windscreens... ect.

I seem to remember "Bryophyllium" from my middle school biology days. I don't remember tailed species, but I knew this genus. That was only about 45 years ago, but I knew of them. So glad James found the tailed one!

Imagine how many millions are on your phone screen right now.

@@AKSnowbat9070

@@AKSnowbat907bro lives in Bikini Bottom

I disagree, extreme scrutiny is what science is all about. Finding increasingly creative ways to prove yourself wrong is like 90% of a scientists job.

​​@@At0mixwouldn't the ability to be creative be stumped if someone just says 'no you're wrong' though? Finding out you're wrong after *trying* different things just wouldn't happen in that case.

@MazTheMeh16 Yea if they don't elaborate then it's not constructive. But in this case James was told to check his sample preparation, he did, and everybody learned something new as a result. Science working as intended.

@@At0mix I understand your reasoning, but I find that most people just give up after being told they're wrong. There are better ways to be constructive.

@@At0mix Extreme scrutiny IS what science is about. Disbelief IS NOT what science is about. Dismissing a possibility because it's unexpected is extremely bad science. Offering an initial alternative explanation to the image, "maybe it was damaged", fine. So this James fella took more samples showing the same pattern (something which the scientist should have suggested perhaps, as opposed to just dismissing out of hand). By that point though the scientist should've been considering perhaps James was right - Multiple samples are showing the same pattern. I would have started asking where James got his samples, how he was processing his samples. It's not random error at this point, it's some reproducible finding. "I don't believe you" is not how you conduct science. Science is not about dismissing findings, even ones which are "incorrect" or don't support a specific hypothesis. It's about taking evidence, all the evidence you can, and determining why that evidence is what it is. Disbelief is not scrutiny. You can as blindly disbelieve in something as you can believe in it, and both are bad science.

Could be... its like that for cicadas

Or maybe it’s a form of a more common cilliate

My thought was "rock-paper-scizors". Let's say you have species A, B, and C. If B shows up in a pond, it kills off all A, and calmly lives there until C comes along and destroys all of them. But surprisingly A makes environment in any pond uninhabitable for C.

The name of the 1933 paper starts: Ciliatenfauna der Umgebung von Szeged. Clearly the sample Gelei found was from Szeged in the very southernmost parts of Hungary, where he was a professor at the university in 1933. 660 km (410 miles) from where James found his samples. I can't find the original paper online but if you look for Tracking down the rare ciliate biosphere you will find the new one by James and Genoveva. Open Access, thankfully.

@@pattheplanterit would be interesting to investigate the oldest ponds in the area around the school and see if any relatives could be found :)

I don’t was wondering if he was drinking. I worry about the volume he seems to drink. I think he overly uses it potentially as a coping mechanism. The overly phrased words can be when someone is severely trying to mask addiction. Of course it could always be a stylist choice and I could be mistaken and jumping to conclusions etc.

Didn't he just have chemotherapy? Or still having it? Maybe you can drink during that. I don't know anything about him except that he has cancer. So since that's what we know, he could be an alcoholic but the simpler explanation is if he presenter is "off" (which I didn't sense myself but I haven't been an alcoholic to knows the nuances) is it is from chemo.

@@jordanbell4736 he’s been in remission for a few months now.

​@@lijohnyoutube101that is a _lot_ of assumptions about a guy you don't even know? Even if having a drinking problem gave you a measured documentary-style voice (???), that's none of any of our business!

It's not really difficult. There are many hand-held ones commercially available at very low prices. It's essentially a tube with a couple of lenses in it, the main thing is to get the lens spacing right, but there's software and many formula for that, and you can get an enormous variety of lenses from scientific supply shops or even places like eBay. It's a cool thing to do, for sure, but it's not really all that much different from making a pin-hole camera, or any other sort of hand-held size DIY project. Here's a simple homemade microscope project from NASA (just remove the space after the NASA.) NASA. gov/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/350502main_Optics_Building_a_Microscope.pdf

I have 1. There's lots of handheld microscopes for sale on Amazon. It works, too, which I found very surprising at first.

I'm thinking how good it would be to get a device that we at home could just put a few drops in.. and it'll show it on a screen like a fish tank!... I could watch it all day.

@@firstnamelastname8058 Yeah, me too. I would love that as well.

@firstnamelastname8058 Amazon sells digital microscopes. They're pretty cheap. Any suppliers of scientific supplies will have them for sale as well, but more expensive and guaranteed not to be counterfeit.

And a link to the new paper James and Genoveva just published on this and other discoveries - Tracking down the rare ciliate biosphere - Open Access and quite interesting. They also describe several other seldom-seen ciliates and possible new species.

I second both if these suggestions.

It looks like they have put the name in the description. But my question is, wouldn't someone already need to know the name to search for it? Anyway, future search AI will probably find it from the image in the thumbnail.

@@EinsteinsHair That's part of the idea, though discoverability through descriptions of characteristics and discussions in the comment section might also get someone on a search here. Either way, it's hard to argue not to include it.

Same!! This channel and all the other ones are simply too amazing for words!!

In a way, it's kind of like hibernation lol. Many ciliates have the ability to form cysts that can protect them for decades.

Rare in the case of a microbe could well just mean we haven't been looking in the right place, at the right time or in the right way. Consider how many undiscovered/undescribed species of macroscopic species there are still out there, and then multiply it by the vastly larger space there is to miss something in the microcosmos.

Why not? In the macro-cosmos there are broods of cicada that gestate for over a decade. The difference is how these ciliates spread. Are they like milkweed or dandelions where, as the theory suggests, their 'seeds' or cysts are spread by the wind? And, is this annual or governed by something else; perhaps a solar cycle (even one astrophysicists haven't detected)?

In addition to the other suggestions here, these are predators, there are always fewer predators than prey and they are susceptible to changes in prey abundance.

@@pattheplanter An excellent and highly pertinent observation. Thank you for reminding me/us of this fact.

He found this ciliate in Szeged, so Bryophyllum caudatum was not German either. The paper was in a German journal, but that is hardly the important part of the discovery.

It could be jealousy. They work their entire careers to be the one to find something new or rare so that they can immortalize themselves, and here a kid with a baroque microscope shows up claiming to have found something new. "He's just inexperienced, naive and clumsy and screwed up his slide. He couldn't possibly do something I've failed to do. Go away kid, you bother me."

@@Dismythed Yeah, but it gives off the same "let's burn Bruno because the Earth is obviously the center of the universe" vibes. I'm not a scientist but I love learning about science, and the best places to find new discoveries are rarely where you think they'll be. It's more a refusal to challenge belief even to the point of laziness. Sad, understandable to a point, but still a hinderance to actual discovery. I used to believe a bunch of juvenile things about the universe until I was proven, through fact and repeatable experimentation, wrong. Give up on feeling embarrassment, you now know the truth, and more often than not even more questions can be raised and explored! Perhaps it is irrational jealousy, but science isn't done irrationally.

established and end-of-career scientists can turn dogmatic

Unfortunately, it looks like it’s seconds away from lysing, hence the bulges (blebs) coming out the sides.

What an Amazing universe God Created ✝️

You haven't seen some of the microbes I interact with. I had a rotifer yesterday that wouldn't cooperate 😆

I was going to say people with giardia would beg to differ, but then I remembered how some people are.

That's what the problem is. But it exactly matches an already-described one, so it's unlikely to be a mutation.

@@thekaxmax I mean with the other already described one too, since we didn't have genetic tests back then. I've also been thinking that since some species change forms in complex ways under specific conditions, like cnidarians for example, maybe some microbes could act like that too, in more ways than just turning into cysts.

@@bengoodwin2141 That's not a mutation, then, that's a new species. Given the appearance and movements are entirely consistent across all the finds.

@@thekaxmax That's not what I meant, I meant an already known species that under specific conditions changes it's appearance to something different, or has offspring that have a different appearance (and we don't know that it does that)

​@@bengoodwin2141 That this microbe is an intermediate step is an interesting idea for sure. There's also an interesting possibility it's a symbiosis with a virus or a microbe. I'm leaning towards virus because it just looks so wildly different on each specimen, like it's just slapping on modules it can find instead of building through a designated blueprint like DNA. I'm curious if they split when reproducing and if that tail is possibly too complex to split, maybe one of the two clones needs to grow a new tail.

Suppose that's what you get from filling your home with microscopy samples

What eminent figures?

⁠@@SophiaAstatineit’s impossible for young scientists to get their grants funded if they are related to UAP. Even if they have easily implementable ideas that would teach us more about them. So the eminent purse strings holders of public research funding, or people like Neil, the comedian astronomer, who mock people for showing an interesting.

@@LouisWaweru UAP?

@@SophiaAstatine it’s an acronym for unidentified anomalous phenomena. Astronomers who capture them in their observatories aren’t given assistance with funding or even collaboration from other observatories for help with confirmation and triangulation. I mentioned it because the rejection of bryophyllum caudatum’s rediscovery reminded me of the other remarkable discoveries, termed “UAP,” being rejected outright by the natural sciences. Neil deGrasse Tyson’s attitude towards studying UAP is an example of the authoritative cockiness we heard about in this video.

@@LouisWaweruI would imagine it depends on how scientists interested in UAP are framing it. If they’re trying to figure out what the phenomena could be within the existing body of science, that’s very different from “aliens”. Finding out what can cause these phenomena is valuable information, at very least to counter the pseudoscientists.

More than one rare ciliate, a handful of rare and some undescribed. Search for - Tracking down the rare ciliate biosphere - Frontiers in Protistology. Published 8/1/24 and Open Access.