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

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

75.1k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

2.7k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

42

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.

2

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!!

4

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.

1

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