h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

An amoeba is very small


Oh ah ee oo there's absolutely no strife
living the timeless life
I don't need a wife
living the timeless life
If I need a friend I just give a wriggle
Split right down the middle
And when I look there's two of me
Both as handsome as can be
Oh here we go slithering, here we go slithering and squelching on
Oh here we go slithering, here we go slithering and squelching on
Oh ah ee oo there's absolutely no strife
living the timeless life


[Extract: Mike Heron, The Incredible Stringband]

Streptococcus should do more creative wriggling (like the vermicious knids in the Great Glass Elevator story). Then they could make chain letters.

Hello there.

I don't remember any streptococci in the Great Glass Elevator.

No strep but the vermicious knids made letters with their own bodies. I don't think amoebae like extruding themselves quite that much. Creative use of the vacuole could let them make an O though. I just thought something bobbly and semi-sticky like streptococcus might be able to create letter shapes by dividing and bending in the right places. There are lots of other choices of bacteria which could work - different sizes of font?

Streptococci like to hang together in strings, if my memory serves me right. One could have one's name up in bacteria the way some people have their names up in lights.

Pick the right ones or add the right genes/chemicals and you could indeed have your name in bacterial lights.

Have you ever come across the amber snail, with its flashing horns? It's a fascinating world we live in.

I'm fairly certain I've never met one of those. I'm not so sure I haven't seen it on TV though. The advantage of TV is that I don't actually have to go to whatever dangerous place the wildlife is found. Woodlice and spiders come to me rather than me going looking for them though.

Amber snails are particularly groovy. They're the intermediate host to a fluke that hangs out in soggy meadows. The flukes' larvae make their way into the snails' eye-stalks and create pulsating rings of brown and green light there. These disco flashings attract the attention of snail-eating birds, in whose bodies the funky flukes are to take up residence.

Are you trying to attract some sort of thread eating bird with all those coloured and pulsating rings?

The snails do sound horribly familiar - from TV as I'm more sure I haven't met one. The birds in my garden (including thrushes and blackbirds) aren't very good at finding the snails and I don't think the snails are very sneaky. So the birds probably need all the help they can get in locating the snails. They are much better at finding my uncooked bacon-rind substitute worms. The robin particularly liked the beheaded fat green caterpillars I set out for him on the patio.

Fat green caterpillars... do you grow your own veg, then? My mother did that for a few years, and her home-grown stuff was far tastier than what you get in the shops. Her place was regularly overrun with .

I have some trees in pots. One poor tree is particularly attractive to butterflies laying eggs. At one point about the only healthy green things dangling from its twigs were caterpillars rather than leaves. I decided it was the tree or them and I valued the tree more. I don't like these tricky decisions. However, the benefit gained by the robin as well as the subsequent recovery of the tree made up for the deaths of the caterpillars.

You're really gonna have to train those garden birds up. Or perhaps, fit them with little spectacles, so they'll spot all those caterpillars and snails without your having to point them out all the time.

Failing that, sack the lot of them and get a new flock in. You can rent some of my own top quality garden birds for a very reasonable fee .

A thought: does your liking for molluscs have anything to do with their being the only things on the planet that you're not allergic to?

(I know that's bad grammar. I'm being colloquial. )

I'm not sure that I'm not allergic to molluscs. I just think they are rather cute. I'm clearly not alone in this view. I like trilobites more than ammonites and woodlice (curl-ups) more than slugs. Newts are another of my favourites and I don't seem to be (significantly) allergic to those - having handled them quite a bit.

I found out recently that a lot of those curl-up woodlice are actually very short millipedes.

The number of legs and distinctive bottoms give them away though. The ones which like to climb up the corner of rooms and then dive off the ceiling into my ear were definitely woodlice. And no that wasn't because I could count the number of footsteps in my ear!

I've just been looking at pictures of them on the internet, and now I'm pretty sure I've never seen a woodlouse-like millipede. They don't look all that similar, after all.

It's nice that your woodlice are into Extreme Sports. I'd love to do skydiving myself .

The woodlice refused to co-operate when my younger brother had to test them in a science lesson. They went to the "wrong" end of the container - light and dry rather than damp and wet as the teacher had asserted. The coward couldn't bring himself to write down the true result of the experiment though and instead he lied and said its behaviour matched what the teacher and bad text book had said. How feeble is that - no scientific integrity at all! Teachers like that need to be shown that they are not right. There are different species of woodlice which like different things plus a certain amount of deviation from the norm in any biological experiment.

Skydiving might be a bit too energetic/enthusiastic for you. Have you tried lucid dreaming?