Heliozoa

Identification pending. This frame stays empty until someone who knows this organism can confirm it is the one on the label — the footage below is part of that question, not an answer to it.

Living radial glass — the closest thing to a Haeckel plate that breathes.

Here is a hunter that has never once given chase.

A heliozoan is a sphere with rays — dozens of them, dead straight, radiating out in every direction at once, each one stiffened from inside by a bundle of microtubules laid out in a pattern so regular it looks manufactured. The cell hangs still in the water and waits for the water to bring it something. When something touches a ray, the ray holds it. Then the ray shortens, drawing the catch inward, and the cell takes it in.

The word is sun animalcule, and whoever coined it was not being fanciful. But the more interesting resemblance is to a drawing. Ernst Haeckel built a career on plates of radiolarians and heliozoans arranged in perfect radial symmetry, and he was accused — correctly — of idealising them beyond what he had actually seen down the tube. Then you watch one of these, and the symmetry is simply there, in the water, unexaggerated.

One caution, which is also the reason this room’s label is vague where the others are specific. “Heliozoan” is not a family. It is a shape, and the shape has been invented more than once by organisms that are not closely related. Calling this one a heliozoan says almost nothing about what it is descended from — only about what it settled on.


In the running

Openly licensed footage filed on Commons under this organism's name. Nobody has chosen which of these should carry the portrait, and nobody has confirmed they all show the same organism as the label. Both are open questions, and neither is answered by us alone.

Choose the one that should carry Heliozoa IZ-005 · ~10 min · on Tinkerism →

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