What looks like modern art here at first glance is actually a two millimeter trumpet animal at dinner. The unicellular lives in ponds and lakes and, with its wide, eyelashes, creates water vertebrae, which – for example bacteria – rinse the food directly into the “mouth”. It also happens again and again that several trumpet animals temporarily join together in a colony and eat together. In the community, the unicellular currents can create stronger currents that suck in more food and prey from a greater distance.
Researchers led by Shashank Shekhar from Emory University in Atlanta are now assuming that this behavior could have preceded the emergence of the development of mult cell over two billion years ago. At that time, the motto of the unicellular organisms was: “Okay, let’s hang together and do something good, but then we will be unicellular again. The multi -cell was not yet permanent,” explains Shekhar.
From temporary colonies, lasting could have developed at some point, in which the different individual organisms finally “merged” with each other into a single multi -cell. Overall, this has happened independently of each other in the history of life on earth in at least 25 different lines of parentage, as the researchers report. The oldest known case is around 2.5 billion years ago. At that time, cyanobacteria merged into thread -like colonies for the first time.