Masa | Life at 1000x

Creatures too small to see - three a day. Magnified photos and the strange ways they live.

[Masa | Life at 1000x @ebaaaay1]

The White Cliffs of Dover are not rock. They are shells - trillions of coccolithophores, each 0.005 mm, snowed onto the sea floor for millions of years and pressed hard. A graveyard standing upright. If you have stood on them: what did you think they were?

[Masa | Life at 1000x @ebaaaay1]

There is a second set of DNA in you, and it is not yours. Mitochondria were free-living bacteria two billion years ago. One got swallowed and stayed. You got every copy from your mother. You are a partnership - which partner is in charge?

[Masa | Life at 1000x @ebaaaay1]

That smell on the towel is not damp. It is a bacterium, Moraxella, living in the fibres, and normal washing does not kill it. Heat over 60C does. Sun does. What have you tried - and did it work?

[Masa | Life at 1000x @ebaaaay1]

You have never smelled rain. That smell is a soil bacterium, and your nose catches it at five parts per trillion - better than a shark smells blood. The rain only delivers it. What does it smell like where you live?

[Masa | Life at 1000x @ebaaaay1]

It has no brain, and it solved a maze. Slime mold floods every corridor, then quits every dead end until only the shortest route is left. Given a map of Tokyo, it rebuilt the rail network in a day. Which city should it fix next?

[Masa | Life at 1000x @ebaaaay1]

Every hole in your bread is a room something used to live in. Baker's yeast: twenty billion per gram, breathing gas into the dough until the oven ends them. If you keep a sourdough starter, you keep billions of them alive on purpose. What is yours called?

[Masa | Life at 1000x @ebaaaay1]

Death had to be invented. A single cell never dies - it splits. Volvox gave that up: a thousand cells, most of which will never divide again, so the ball can swim. The first body and the first corpse arrived on the same day. Would you take the amoeba's deal?

[Masa | Life at 1000x @ebaaaay1]

Four out of five animals on Earth are roundworms. A handful of soil holds thousands. You've never seen the most successful animal alive.

[Masa | Life at 1000x @ebaaaay1]

The euglena's red dot isn't an eye. It's a sunshade over a light sensor. One pixel of vision, and it still finds the sun every morning.

[Masa | Life at 1000x @ebaaaay1]

Didinium: a 0.1 mm barrel that spears and swallows prey twice its size - whole. The pond has monsters too.

[Masa | Life at 1000x @ebaaaay1]

Poke it and it collapses into a ball in a fiftieth of a second. Stentor, up to 2 mm - one single cell, with no muscle at all. It still flinches.

[Masa | Life at 1000x @ebaaaay1]

A creature with no shape at all. The amoeba pours itself toward lunch, wraps around it, and becomes a stomach. No body plan, no problem.

[Masa | Life at 1000x @ebaaaay1]

The paramecium carries thousands of spring-loaded darts under its skin. One touch, and a predator meets a wall of needles. No brain required.

[Masa | Life at 1000x @ebaaaay1]

A jellyfish that ages backwards. When the 1 cm immortal jellyfish is injured or starving, it shrinks back into a polyp - the stage it was born from - and grows up all over again. In theory, forever.

[Masa | Life at 1000x @ebaaaay1]

A see-through animal with a visible heartbeat. Water flea, 1.5 mm. The whole body is transparent, so you can watch the heart beat — about 200 times a minute, for a two-month life. Nothing hidden, and it gets along fine.

[Masa | Life at 1000x @ebaaaay1]

Something is probably living in your face right now. Face mites, 0.3 mm, live in the pores of most adults — and come out at night to walk around. You've never felt a single step.

[Masa | Life at 1000x @ebaaaay1]

Kyoto in autumn is now a queue with a temple at the end.

Swaps if you hate crowds:
Kyoto temples, for Matsue + Izumo. Original castle, oldest shrine, no queue
Kaiseki prices, for a fishing-port market lunch
Fuji viewpoints, for Mt. Daisen, "Hoki Fuji"

A few hours from Osaka.

[Masa | Life at 1000x @ebaaaay1]

@ebay95808411 @michi_wo_hiraku またぜひお願いします！

[Masa | Life at 1000x @ebaaaay1]

@ebay95808411 父親が趣味で椎茸やってますね！まずは丸パクリですね
すぐ送ります！