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If the microcosmos is like many tiny oceans all around us filled with its own fantastic creatures,
you might imagine this paramecium as a barge traveling through those waters.
All along its edges are many cilia at work, beating and steering it along.
The striations that stretch down its body are on full display, long and smooth until
the paramecium brushes up against its neighbors and those lines compress against each other,
turning the barge into maybe more of a blimp. Whatever large mode of transportation you choose
to compare it to though, the paramecium is slow and steady. Except that, actually,
it isn’t. The slowness, the steadiness—we did that. All thanks to the wonder of slow motion.
Unless we note otherwise, all of the footage that you are going to be seeing
in this video today has been slowed down. James, our master of microscopes,
filmed these videos with a high-speed camera. We don’t have one of those really fancy cameras
that can record tens of thousands of frames per second. But it does record at 240 frames per
second, which lets us show you footage that is eight times slower than what
we would normally show on this channel.. And the results, we think, are beautiful
and kind of soothing and I’ve been really looking forward to sharing them with you.
Don’t get us wrong, the microcosmos at full speed is
beautiful and soothing as well. But like with this ciliate here, sometimes
the spinning and whirling happens so quickly that it’s difficult to make out the details.
We keep just getting a glance of it before it moves out of frame or twists out of focus, and
describing the movements it makes seems to take more time than the movement itself actually does.
But while we cannot command the ciliate into the right position, we can slow it
down after the fact. And that is amazing. I mean, imagine the work that early
microscopists had to do, centuries before video even existed, to illustrate with words and with
drawings what they saw—to evoke movements in the microcosmos for others who would
never be able to see those exact movements. And not only can we share those moments with
tens or hundreds of thousands of people, we can slow them down to see new details in them,
like the large vacuole opening and closing at one end of this ciliate.
Slowing down the microcosmos does not necessarily mean everything travels at
the same slow speed though. The giant blepharisma and spirostomum here,
for example, may be idly passing through. But they’re surrounded on all sides by the
still-frantic rotations and vibrations of corkscrew-shaped bacteria
And at the other end, we have the spiky ciliate actinobolina, almost static except
for its toxic tentacles waving like blue blades of grass in a microscopic breeze.
The movements are subtle, and they can lull you into a sense that nothing is really
happening. But this is the microcosmos. There is always something happening.
It just takes some patience and attention to notice.
Over time, the actinobolina’s tentacles have stretched out,
making the organism look like a faceless pufferfish.
Like we said, we’re fortunate to have the technology to see
these acts unfold. But this is not the only way to stretch time in the microcosmos.
In the early 20th century, for example, scientists wanted to be able to see the movement of cilia
more clearly. After all, cilia is a remarkable feat of coordination and movement driven not
by limbs, but by hair-like organelles. However, one cannot simply ask a ciliate
to slow down a bit so that there’s time to take notes and ask questions.
It will move at its own speed, on its own time. So scientists turned to reagents to do what’s
called fixation, an act that’s like freezing the cells in a moment in time,
with its last moments on display, like a memory stuck on repeat until it slowly degrades away.
Now, we’re being a bit melodramatic about the effects of fixation because
we can be. For our purposes, video gives us all we need to look at microbes without knowingly
putting them at risk. We can see this Stentor’s cilia beating, creating a curled path through
its body. Even the texture of the cilia seems almost tangible like this, like you could imagine
running your hands across this microbe and feeling the silky fringe brushing your fingertips.
And for us, with what we hope to see of the microcosmos, that is enough.
But fixation is a useful technique in biology that is still used today. And for the scientists
studying cilia motion, fixation allowed them to see the cilia more clearly, to make out
the structures and coordination at work. And you can see that movement here on this
didinium, one small band wrapped around the middle, and a larger band hanging like a giant
mustache. As the camera shifts focus, the hair along the organism’s body becomes less visible,
and instead the only visible cilia are the ones flapping on the side of the organism.
Those coordinated movements we see—the ones that scientists used chemical reagents and
electron microscopy to describe—is called the metachronal wave. It is each cilia beating just
slightly behind one neighbor and ahead of the next, like a crowd doing the wave in a stadium.
As each wave travels, through individuals and then the crowd, the organism moves.
The microcosmos travels at many speeds. We see it every week, with each new video on
this channel and the microbes we watch together. And it is, to us at least, nice to know that
however much we can slow down together to enjoy this, it is always possible to go just a bit
slower, but when we look deeper, however we do it, somehow, there is always something new to find.
But also, always another breath we can take, just to think, to imagine, and to enjoy.
So, thank you for coming on this journey with us as we explore the unseen world that surrounds us.
And thank you also to Wondrium for sponsoring this episode.
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There you can find incredible courses like Mysteries of the Microscopic World,
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