The Shark of the Soil

There is a protozoan, wormlike monster of the microscopic world, seen only about forty times in two centuries, which gobbles up its fellow one-celled creatures a hundred at a time, walks backwards and forwards at once, and hunts in packs.

It is fifty times the size of the most familiar of one-celled animals, the paramecia, which constitute the dominant population (in numbers) of the invisible creation. It moves among the paramecia like a giant, flesh-eating dinosaur among humans. It is a cumbersome, slow-moving mass of protoplasm. Two or three get together and completely surround a large school of paramecia and these are divided as meals for the captors.

The creature was first described by the Swedish botanist Linnaeus in 1775. He called it Chaos chaos. It consists of a single cell, but differs from other one-celled animals in having three cell nuclei, instead of a single one. To reproduce, it splits in three parts, each a new animal.

Chaos chaos moves by stretching itself out into a ribbon-like form and proceeds, by a series of tugs of war, with one end or the other winning out. The animal supposedly is very rare and has been seen only about once every ten years. It may be a missing link between single-and multi-celled animals—or it may be on an entirely different evolutionary track.