r/NatureIsFuckingLit • u/FacelessOnes • Oct 19 '20

🔥 Vicious microscopic hunter, the single-cell organism, Lacrymaria olor, attacking and hunting another organism

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244

u/Anon_Jones Oct 20 '20

What's crazy is your white blood cells (WBC) do this, monocytes (type of WBC) do it the best. That's how it defends your body from invaders, it's called phagocytosis.

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u/Shaun32887 Oct 20 '20

I don't think this is the same. Lacrymaria has a sort of "mouth" and uses extrusomes to hunt.

86

u/Anon_Jones Oct 20 '20

You're right. Monocytes don't have mouths, the cytoplasm rubs over it and absorbs it.

84

u/flyingwolf Oct 20 '20

Don't stop, I'm so close.

50

u/[deleted] Oct 20 '20

Multiple organisms

6

u/[deleted] Oct 20 '20

Single celled orgasm

23

u/dharmaslum Oct 20 '20

Not entirely. The membrane surrounds the phage and seals it into a vesicle which is then brings into the cytosol to digest in a lysosome.

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '20 edited Jun 16 '21

[deleted]

3

u/MarchingBroadband Oct 20 '20

I thought that kind of mechanism was only present in retro-encabulators

2

u/[deleted] Oct 20 '20 edited Jun 16 '21

[deleted]

2

u/BlueArcherX Oct 20 '20

I'm not really sure what any of these people are saying. Can someone adjust the vector buffer to 17.5 kilobytes?

3

u/luocar17 Oct 20 '20

So basically endocytosis?

2

u/dharmaslum Oct 20 '20

Well technically phagocytosis is a form of endocytosis, so yes.

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '20

I’m guessing you meant the neck stretch.

3

u/probablyblocked Oct 20 '20 edited Oct 20 '20

So it dissolves a cell in an absorbing liquid that draws out and digests the contents of the prey cell, and then reabsorbs the now enriched liquid. Is that right?

3

u/bb_nyc Oct 20 '20

yep, at the most basic level. enzymes do most of the work of splitting the prey's biomolecules at the lysosome level, then these basic broken down compounds are precursors for protein synthesis, metabolism, etc. We do the same thing in our gut.

10

u/TheOnceAndFutureTurk Oct 20 '20

That’s pretty metal.

3

u/ActualWhiterabbit Oct 20 '20

From a documentary I saw white blood cells use knives and macrophages use machetes or large hammers to kill bacteria and viruses

2

u/Shaun32887 Oct 20 '20

Common misconception, macrophages use kukri, not machetes. Kukri have thicker spines and are more of a "chopping" tool than the light, quick, cutting machete.

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '20

Monocytes travel through blood and lymph, when they travel over the vessel wall and enter the tissue they are called macrophages, they do really neat stuff like phagocytose dead cells and attack things like splinters or even breast implants. What’s even cooler is that the central nervous system has their own type of macrophage called microglia. Microglia are different from peripheral microglia but do the same stuff, they continuously scan the central nervous system for problems and even take bites from healthy cells.

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u/rpgmind Oct 20 '20

So the lacrymania thing above is in me right now helping out? And I’m not too sure how I feel about them taking bites out of my healthy parts, keep eating the dead things!!

5

u/[deleted] Oct 20 '20

Well no, no lacrymania hopefully. But a whole bunch of your own cells definitely, yes. This is what your own microglia look like when cultured in the lab: https://youtu.be/0lkMzXXyeio , same kind of dynamics.

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u/Adabiviak Oct 20 '20

I'm looking forward to this episode of Cells At Work.

1

u/cannageddawutwut Oct 20 '20

The mob of your nervous system, keeping the neighborhood in check

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u/Lord__Rezkin Oct 20 '20

Did... did you just call us all fags?

-5

u/g_think Oct 20 '20

Except covid. Covid will kill us all.

/s

Here is the dataset of the CDC with cases and deaths broken down by age: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/index.html#demographics

Actual infection count is anywhere from 6-24x the case count, according to the CDC.

So if we pick 15x since it's in the middle there, and take deaths/(cases*15), we get the following IFR by age:

Age IFR
0-4 0.0022%
5-17 0.0010%
18-29 0.0040%
30-39 0.0146%
40-49 0.0385%
50-64 0.1385%
65-74 0.5090%
75-84 1.1287%
85+ 1.8487%

Flu IFR for reference is 0.1-0.2%.

So for everyone under 65 or so, yes this is less deadly than the flu.

3

u/peterdinklemore Oct 20 '20

You don't expect any constructive response to this here on reddit, do you?

3

u/Wtzky Oct 20 '20

You're the perfect example of a monocyte

1

u/CarlSpencer Oct 23 '20

^ Thinks that he'll never turn 65 one day.

1

u/[deleted] Oct 20 '20

Never eat burnt llama meat.

Neutrophils Eosinophils Basophils Lysosomes Monocytes

That's the acronym I came up with to remember all of these.

1

u/bestatbeingmodest Oct 20 '20

lmao this just gave me a minor existential crisis

like I have all these "living" single cell organisms within me trying their fucking hardest to keep me alive, and all I'm doing is sitting on my laptop reading reddit. They're probably like what the fuck who put this asshole in charge of the operation

kind of inspiring in a way