A single cell, shaped like a long-stemmed trumpet, is anchored at its narrow end and fans open at the wide end into a rim of beating cilia that pulls water — and whatever is in it — down into the cell. The whole body is blue-green. It sways slowly on its stalk, exploring the water around it, and every so often snaps shut, contracting to a fraction of its length in a fraction of a second, then unfurls again and resumes feeding.

A single cell that can change its mind.

It sits still, which is the first surprising thing.

Most of what lives at this scale is in a hurry — spinning, tumbling, colliding, gone. Stentor anchors itself by the tail, opens the wide end of its body into a rim of beating hairs, and waits. Water comes to it. It is blue, actually blue, from a pigment in its skin that no one has fully explained. And it is one cell. Not a colony, not a larva, not an animal too small to see. One cell, built like a trumpet, a millimetre or two of it, doing everything a body does with none of the parts a body uses.

Poke it and it flinches — bends away from whatever touched it. Poke it again and it tries something else. Keep going and it works down through a sequence of increasingly expensive answers, until at last it does the thing that costs it the most: it lets go of the floor and swims off to find somewhere better.

That ordering is the part worth sitting with. There is no brain in there to hold it.


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 Stentor IZ-001 · ~10 min · on Tinkerism →

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