#also hmu if you run a protist fandom blog

[merismo]

Satellite footage of sun bursts A single-celled organism (Staurojoenina assimilis) stained with flagella and cell-surface dye.

The hindguts of termites (where you can find these protists) are jam-packed with life, though perhaps a little too much life. Trying to separate out the DNA from a species without contaminant DNA getting in the way is a difficult task, and can sometimes lead to misleading results. Dyes like these could be used alongside a machine called a flow cytometer to separate out different cells, and hopefully obtain a clean "pool" of just one species (out of many).

Not too useful for Staurojoenina, which at a (relatively) whopping 130 micrometers is easy to manually collect. Here it is without the dye:

but certainly useful for protist species such as Tricercomitus divergens, which at 2-5 micrometers are often dwarfed by its bacterial neighbors:

There's actually two of them in this photo, believe it or not. I'll give you a hint- they are smaller than the squiggly lines (which are bacteria)

It's crazy to think that a eukaryotic cell, complete with a nucleus and organelles, can be smaller than a bacterial cell! Well, ignoring the freakishly large bacteria.