PERSONALLY, I would avoid putting the Chia in Protist/Monera/Vira. Protists are a wastebin taxon, Monera don't have nuclei (I'm assuming the large blue blob in the Chia is the nucleus... ?), and I'm guessing 'Vira' is viruses - but those aren't actually alive :v I saw someone say it doesn't seem to have chloroplasts either so probably not a plant. Maybe 'large bacterium'??
i have to reread what i looked into on protist/monera/vira but what i can say right now is that for our purposes the superkingdom here is more of a catchall for anything that isn't fungi, animalia, plantae or alien. so protista might be the closest comparison, actually. i think i wanted to avoid making decisions on earth kingdoms since a few things get categorized multiple ways and i found a lot of contradictory discussions of how everything besides the big three get categorized. unfortunately though this could mean mixing up whole domains which, my god...
besides all that, though, in my mind, the relevant candidates are typically too small for us to pull apart and see whether they've got nuclei or even DNA so distinctions on this level start to become largely conjecture and it's just not worth getting into. so on top of mismatched taxonomic schema, it'd still just end up being a category of "very small things that we know aren't the other kind of things."
anyway bacteria (and archaea!) don't have nuclei, and fungal cells aren't too far of a reach either. also, i think it's debatable whether the green stripey bits in the Transparent Chia couldn't be chloroplasts. i would actually argue that the large interior blue balloon could be a large central vacuole. it would make sense for a Chia to be a plant given their unique chia pop colors.
but being one giant cell is extremely notable nonetheless. and we have so few candidates in our poorly named fifth kingdom, it would be such a boon to pull as big a name as the Chia. i'm rooting for kingdom 5 but I keep my mind open and attuned to the evidence as it comes in.
















