"Several of Leeuwenhoek's contemporaries tried and failed to replicate his observations until finally Robert Hooke--the famed microscopist and writer-slash-illustrator of Micrographia--was able to see the tiny animalcules Leeuwenhoek had seen. Hooke however was willing to outline his specific methods and demonstrate them, validating the observations Leeuwenhoek had made and providing others with the means to make their own microbial ventures.... Hooke was reportedly so taken with Leeuwenhoek's work that he learned Dutch to read his letters."
Journey to the Microcosmos
Journey to the Microcosmos- Leeuwenhoek: The First Master of Microscopes
A newfound single-celled microbe species forms groups of multiple individual organisms that change shape in response to light.
There’s not much to a choanoflagellate. But a new species of these single-celled organisms, animals’ closest evolutionary relatives (SN: 7/29/15), could provide crucial clues to a fundamental question in biology: How did solitary cells band together long ago to form multicellular coalitions capable of moving, hunting and hiding?
Most choanoflagellates live simple, solitary lives. So when cell biologist Nicole King, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at the University of California, Berkeley and her colleagues discovered hundreds of these organisms locked together in a sample taken from a splash pool along the coast of the Caribbean island of Curaçao, they were surprised. The cells formed a concave sheet, with their tail-like flagella extending from the cupped side.
What happened next stunned the scientists. In unison, the organisms making up the sheet inverted into a ball-like shape, tiny flagella flailing outward like tiny oars, allowing the organisms to swim much more swiftly. Accordingly, the team dubbed the new species Choanoeca flexa.
“It was this crazy behavior unlike anything we’d ever heard of in choanoflagellates,” King says, “We just had to figure out how they pulled it off.”
"Reading Leeuwenhoek's work is kind of like following an old treasure map. His words lay out pathways and clues that help us navigate through a drop of 17th century water. If you follow that map, at the end you find a wealth of information, the knowledge of microbes and their identities that was still unknown in his time, but that in the centuries since has been accumulated."
Journey to the Microcosmos- Leeuwenhoek: The First Master of Microscopes
