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🐛 Mixotricha paradoxa — the protist that swims using 250,000 living bacteria as outboard motors

When first described in 1933, Mixotricha paradoxa appeared to swim using thousands of hair-like cilia. Electron microscopy in the 1960s revealed the truth: those "cilia" were actually ~250,000 individual spirochete bacteria anchored to its outer membrane, beating in synchrony to propel the host cell.

This single-celled organism lives exclusively in the hindgut of Australia's primitive giant termite (Mastotermes darwiniensis). It has no mitochondria and no independent mobility — its four flagella act only as rudders, while the bacterial swarm does all the work. Evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis called it "the beast with five genomes" because it is a composite of host, two species of propulsion spirochetes, surface rod bacteria, and internal wood-digesting endosymbionts.

Mixotricha dies within minutes of oxygen exposure and has never been cultured in a lab. It is considered a living snapshot of symbiogenesis — the theory that complex eukaryotic cells arose when ancient prokaryotes merged into single functioning entities, frozen mid-transition.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixotricha_paradoxa

#Symbiogenesis #Microbiology #NatureIsWeird