Dr. Ben Larson
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Appearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
Thanks.
I'm excited to be here.
Hello.
Glad to be here.
I think glued to the eyepiece of a microscope is probably the right picture for me.
I mean, there can be fighting over territory, certainly, but a lot of the cells that I think about and study are fighting to get food.
And so there can be, you know, arms races where they're battling one another.
Or, you know, there are all sorts of fascinating predatory strategies that exist in the protist world that I think about.
So the microbial eukaryotes.
Okay.
So the first one that comes to mind is one of my favorites.
So there is this type of cell.
It's a type of dinoflagellate.
You might know about these things.
Some of them are bioluminescent or some of them can form these harmful blooms and become toxic.
But there's a certain species where the cell actually has a structure.
It's called an alkaloid and it's basically an eye for the cell.
So it's like a camera eye with a lens and a photo sensor.
It has an eye.
Okay.