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Sex Life Of The Amoeba Xoggoth
Alice the Amoeba had those urges again. It was reproduction time. And so she retired bashfully to her little hole in the dead spirogyra (1) cell and thought naughty division thoughts while palpating the gusset of her little pink nucleus. Uh, uh uh,uh uhhhhhhhhhhhh went Alice. Then Arnold and Anthea (2) lay back and had a smoke and got their breath back before oozing away.
Within an hour (3) of course Arnold and Anthea started to get those same unspeakable urges themselves. Arnold went back to the spirogyra cell that Alice had thoughtfully left him in her will (4). He got out his microscopic copy of Razzle and began looking at all the naughty pictures of single celled organisms. He stroked his pseudopodium. Some were posing with their contractile vacuoles (5) held open; some were even openly using their flagella (6). He was approaching his cytokinesis (7) aaaaahh!
Afterwards Algernon and Angela lay back and had a smoke and told each other it had been really great, probably their best division ever. Angela told Algernon his pseudopodium was one of the largest she had ever seen. Algernon told Angela she had a really great pair of pseudopodia (8). Vowing to keep in touch they oozed off into the pond.
And so it went on really, Algernon begat Aaron and Agatha, Aaron begat Arthur and Anastasia, Arthur begat Adam and Anita, Adam begat... (9) and so on down to the 1000th generation. Which took them well into teatime the next day (3).
Technical footnotes
1 That green slimy algae that you get in ponds. Especially ponds in chalky areas with plenty of sunshine and old lager cans.
2 All amoebas have christian names beginning with A. You are probably thinking this is just typically childish alliteration on my part but it is an established genetic fact. When amoebas split, the genomes are genetically identical to those of the parent amoeba except for a single strand of DNA that determines the amoeba's name. The first RNA fragment in this strand is fixed, hence the A. Similarly, Parameciums (10) have names beginning with P and Euglenas have names beginning with E. The fact that the scientific names and christian names begin with the same letters is a complete coincidence of course. It is very odd that this coincidence applies for all 6 million species but there you go. The rare Xenogium has quite a problem and scientists suspect this is why it is rare, the DNA division is slowed while the nucleus tries to come up with another unique name beginning with X. Most of them die of old age before they manage to reproduce.
3 This is a gross libel on amoebas. They are not nearly as promiscuous as that; the daughter cells are not ready for mitosis for another 24 hours. But my version sounds funnier.
4 Wills and legal contracts generally are defined by another DNA strand. This is consistent with the previous point that all DNA strands except name are identical. Obviously Arnold and Anthea had identical copies of the will; there would have been all sorts of legal complications otherwise. I do not know why Anthea was cut out of Alice's will. Science does not yet fully understand the emotional life of these primitive organisms.
5 For those of you who do not have O or even CGSE level biology, a contractile vacuole is a space within the cell of some single celled organisms that collects excess water and expels it periodically by contraction in order to maintain osmotic equilibrium. You can find similar dry scientific descriptions for various body parts of people. That does not alter the fact that these parts are VERY RUDE and casual examination of them and their functions is not done by nice people or nice micro-organisms whichever applies.
6 For the educationally challenged again (good grief, I bet some of you do not even have a DEGREE!) flagella are whip-like organelles used for locomotion by a class of protists known as the flaggellata. You may say, if these are organs of locomotion, that my approach, as usual, is just the sign of a prurient and dirty mind. Don't come the innocent with me sunshine, you know as well as I do, it's how you use these things that counts. You may be sure the subjects of such magazine pictures were not going for an innocent swim around the duckweed. Not with those leather masks on anyway.
7 Final cell division. Don't you know anything????? I really cannot be bothered to explain things even a child should know. Please refer to the definitive paper on this subject. "Cellular Mitosis in Eukaryotic Organisms" By Srulagna Chatterjee and Joseph Heinkel, Department of Biochemistry, Raisa Institute, CA, USA.
8 Well of course they both had pseudopodia, they are amoebas. What did you expect, human naughty bits? Maybe you are confused by the fact that one had a boy's name and one a girl's. This is just another facet of their genetic chemistry that science has not yet unravelled. It does not mean anything. My use of he or she in this learned treatise is just a convention.
9 I do apologise to any female readers for only following the male line but it would be very difficult to actually follow both lines. 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 etc. work it out for yourself. This post would go on from now until the apocalypse. Anyhow, if this approach was good enough for the bible (Genesis 25) it's certainly good enough for a humble atheist. If you have any complaints take it up with him upstairs.
10 I very much doubt you would know this one (good grief!) but the group protozoa is polyphyletic. That means it is not a well defined group of closely related creatures like birds or reptiles but just a rag bag of totally unrelated tiny things that the biologists could not be bothered to classify properly. Nowadays in fact, they just tend to lump them all with single celled algae and call them protists. Doesn't anyone even care about doing their job properly these days? Anyhow, to get to the point, paramecium is much more advanced than amoeba and can reproduce by conjugation in which two cells exchange nuclear material before splitting. Yes, it's practically proper rumpy pumpy as we know it! Paramecium are just visible to the naked eye but I hope this revelation will not cause you all to hang around your garden pond hoping to catch a glimpse of these goings on. Give the poor little creatures some privacy! I have a microscope myself. Fnaar fnaar. Saves me wasting petrol driving to the car park in the local woods.
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