Okay, so the ameba Chaos Carolinensis is the world's largest protozoan,
standing a hefty 1/10mm tall. It looks like a dot to the naked eye.
Big fat hairy deal! What this world needs is a protozoan big enough to
not only hold in your hand, but to hold up to the light so you can watch
all the little internal thingies oozing around with the naked eye.
Heck, you could even keep this hypthetical Big Protozoan as a pet.
You could slice it up and have a tasty snack, or you could substitute it
for the lost beanbag in that old Toss Across(R) game in your attic.
Someone needs to breed a really big ameba, and a really big paramecium,
and a really big euglena. After all, otherwise we'll never know what
SOUND they make when they crawl around! Do they go "goosh goosh", or
"slurrrrrrp", or "skritch skritch", or even "whirrrrrr"? Does a paramecium
with a missing cilium go "99-thump"? WE DON'T KNOW! THEY'RE TOO SMALL!
Inagine if you had a euglena the size of a horse so that you could ride it.
Whipping around at 300 scale miles per hour, you'd be the coolest!
Imagine having an ameba you could use as a garbage disposal--twenty
digestive vacuoles, no waiting!
HAVE YOU EVER USED AN AMEBA AS A WATERBED? YOU WILL!
Yes, science could provide humanity with an endless source of fun merely
by figuring out how to make little critters really big. Maybe exposing
them to an atomic blast will make them grow to enormous proportions,
like it did to those ants!
And although I know it's an algae colony and not a mere protozoan, I'd
also like to request that the scientific community develop a way of
making a volvox large enough to use as a geodesic dome. I'm tired of
living in this darn diatom!
-- K.
