Grape sized protists leave "worm trails"

[Johonebesus]

There has just been discovered a type of big protist that slowly moves along the sea floor in the Bahamas. It takes weeks or months to move a few inches, but without strong currents they can leave long trails. These tracks are evidently very similar to fossil tracks predating the Cambrian by about half a billion years. I knew such tracks were used as evidence that worms or worm like creatures might have evolved in the Ediacaran, but I didn't know the tracks were that old. It may be that giant protists made the tracks. These are single celled organisms up to three centimeters. Maybe this is old news to the biologists here, but I had no idea that a single celled beastie could grow to more than an inch in size.

BBC Story

[NecronLord]

Well, by one definition, an Ostrich Egg is (initially) a single cell.

[Darth Yoshi]

Holy shit. 3cm? That's pretty big for a single cell. I'm surprised that it can hold up so well to water pressure.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

Holy shit. 3cm? That's pretty big for a single cell. I'm surprised that it can hold up so well to water pressure.

Given that a cell is, essentially, a bag of salt-water with some proteins thrown in for shits and giggles, it shouldn't come as a surprise. Single cells by themselves do fine, its when you start making macroscopic constructions out of them that you start worrying about things like pressure.

[Melchior]

Holy shit. 3cm? That's pretty big for a single cell. I'm surprised that it can hold up so well to water pressure.

Given that a cell is, essentially, a bag of salt-water with some proteins thrown in for shits and giggles, it shouldn't come as a surprise. Single cells by themselves do fine, its when you start making macroscopic constructions out of them that you start worrying about things like pressure.

The problems with really big cells is usally that volume (usally correlated with metabolic needs) grows a order of magnitude faster than the surface area (usually the limiting factor in metabolic ability); this organism probably lives very slowly.

[Gullible Jones]

Grape-sized isn't tremendously large for a xenophyophore. What surprises me is that these ones are spherical; most IIRC deal with the surface/volume problem by being frilly.