Something Strange Happens When You Tear These Creatures Apart
When people die, our whole body dies with us. The heart stops pumping; the gut stops digesting; every cell that carries a person’s genetic blueprint eventually extinguishes, until their molecular signature is extinct. This is the curse of humans’—really, most animals’—multicellular makeup: The cells within our bodies are so specialized, so interdependent, that their fates are lashed together even in death.
Multicellularity does not have to manifest this way, however. Just a hop, skip, and a jump over from us on the tree of life are the —little marine and freshwater creatures roughly the size of yeast. Choanoflagellates commonly appear as single cells with a long, whipping tail, a bulbous head, and a frilly collar, resembling, as my colleague Ed Yong , “a sperm wearing a skirt.” But under the right conditions, choanoflagellates can also bloom into many-celled bodies, joining individual cells together into single that may help them survive.
