• azi@mander.xyz
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        5 hours ago

        It looks nothing like either a centric or pennate diatom

        • meyotch@slrpnk.net
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          5 hours ago

          Nonetheless it is in no way a phage. What might it be, do you think?

          I know it’s a joke meme, but I did not achieve my grand success in life by being ‘fun’. It’s just not my thing ;)

          • SoleInvictus
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            5 hours ago

            Probably a radiolarian skeleton. Check out pictures of the cornutella genus. The morphology and relative size to the tardigrades match up.

            Edit: score! Looking up tardigrade and cornutella together brought me to the source of the picture. I knew all that school was good for something. Here’s a screenshot because fuck Xitter:

  • gianni@lemmy.ca
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    2 days ago

    I did not realize that tardigrades were so small. Previously I thought one would be able to see one with the naked eye.

    • PotatoesFall@discuss.tchncs.de
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      1 day ago

      I’m not a biologist but there is no way in hell that a virus can be as big as a living organism right? That’s probably not a bacteriophage

      • ByteJunk@lemmy.world
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        23 hours ago

        Definitely not, a bacteriophage is like 500 nanometres. A tardigrade is 0.5 mm, or 500 000 nanometres, literally 1000x the size.

    • azi@mander.xyz
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      5 hours ago

      Most species grow to half a millimetre. So they’re just barely visible to the naked eye; like a small spec of dust.