Talk:Paramecium

Are we capable of doing anything with this plant? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 209.149.228.96 (talk) 15:33, 23 April 2009 (UTC)

l just want in which category this fall@ 103.137.24.192 (talk) 00:41, 21 May 2023 (UTC)

Is this protozoa animal like, plant like or fungi like?

Protozoa = animal-like, but the similarity is superficial. Paramecium is probably closer to plants (they are both bikonts) than to animals or fungi (opisthokonts).

The 2 p's

Is paramecium a part of protozoa?

Yes and No (I believe) because they thoght that until new discoveries

. Hey, my warranty didn't run out after all! 00:23, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

Collection of Paramecium

How can you collect paramecium? With a stick! --scienceman 21:31, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

Vandalism

I find it odd how long this article went with such blatant vandalism, even with a few edits in the mean time with no-one seeming to notice. I don't normally do any editing though, so maybe this is commonplace.—The preceding unsigned comment was added by 24.146.24.74 (talk) 02:48, 23 December 2006 (UTC).

Does Paramecium rotate when swimming?

random microbiology question

does anyone know what the effect would be if a human ingested paramecium? need to know for micro class & can't find info anywhere. thanks! MAybe i can google it, i'll see. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 67.187.178.243 (talk) 07:11, 15 March 2007 (UTC).

Possible addition

Hello. While not new to Wikipedia, I've never before attempted to add any content. Anyways, I have a simple, generic, monochromatic diagram of a paramecium that I created for a Bio class that might fit in well here. However, being new to this system, I have no idea how to upload it and then add it the page, or, more appropriately, add a link to it. --Phoenex 14:02, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

Cleanup Required

Somebody's put some work into this article recently, but lots of the new material just repeats the (very good) introductory material, only using simpler language. I get the impression that someone pasted in their homework. Unfortunately, their essay started with a verbatim copy of an older version of the article! Nevertheless, the new material does contain some extra information. I've separated it out from the older, better stuff, and cut out some of the more obvious repetition. More work required. AlexTingle 07:31, 24 April 2007 (UTC)

request for further editing

This article, while very superficial and in lay terms, was helpful to me. However, there are a couple of points which are confusing and need more detail.

1. "Certain single-celled eukaryotes, such as Paramecium, are examples for exceptions to the universality of the genetic code (translation systems where a few codons differ from the standard ones)."

  ...?  please explain how paramecium are exceptions to standard dna replication

2."[edit] Symbiosis One of the most interesting symbiosis relationships known to man is that of Paramecium aurelia and its bacterial endosymbionts. The bacteria infect the protozoa and they produce toxic particles that kill sensitive strains but not killer strains. Giant amoeba, for instance, have 2 types of endosymbiotes, which seem to function as mitochondria in these amoeba. Another example involves protozoa bacteria that produce cellulases that assist the protozoa in cellulose digestion. It is a cell that appears at quiet ponds."

 If the symbiotic relationship between this paramecium and bacteria is  "one of the most interesting known to man,"

it would be nice to know what is known about this relationship. it only says that bacteria infect and kill certain paramecium. That doesn't sound very beneficial to me. please explain. also, mentioning the giant amoeba and some unnamed protazoa is out of place here, as it has no direct relationship to paramecium, and belongs in an article about symbiotic relationships. The final sentence looks like it was stuck on at some later point. it should just be deleted. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Jseagles (talk • contribs) 23:44, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

The wording (especially about what "killer strains" actually means) is so ambiguous, I edited it out. If someone puts it back in, they need to clear up just what "killer strains" means does it refer to strains of bacteria or of Paramecium?). rowley (talk) 19:20, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

Spelling

Running the risk of being banal, isn't it spelt Paramoecium. I think that is the correct spelling.

The "oe" is an example of a greek diphthong that is commonly rendered simply as "e" in modern English. rowley (talk) 19:18, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

Paramecium are Fast (So I've seen firsthand)

In the Seventh Grade, I had the chance to look under the microscope at some paramecium.

I found it rather surprising when I didn't see any mention of just how fast paramecium can move.

Their little cilla allows them to zip all over the petri dish!

Howver, there may be a lot of types of paramecium, so I may have been looking at just one species.

Yet, they really are fast.
74.184.188.59 (talk) 23:46, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

from: anoynmous user: who cares about spellin! and they swim very slow because i said so — Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.80.112.166 (talk) 23:14, 11 January 2013 (UTC)

Symbiosis

I cut out this chunt of other examples of symbiosis in othter species from this article on paramecia, just to help keep the article clean. 155.91.28.231 (talk) 17:27, 10 March 2010 (UTC)

Giant amoebas, for instance, have types of endosymbiotes, which seem to function as mitochondria in these amoebas. Another example involves protozoa bacteria that produce cellulases to assist the host protozoan with cellulose digestion (similar to those found in some in termites).

EM communication

There is some uncertainty about the validity of the the research regarding the ability of Paramecium to communicate via electromagnetic radiation based on this paper. User:Icek thinks that it is an April's fool joke, which User:Bus stop disagrees with. I myself and sat on the fence - I think if it was an April's fool joke, there would be some coverage of it somewhere (which I can't find) and I've never heard of scientific journals doing April fool's jokes before. That said, having read the paper and also having read stuff about biophotons before, I'm unsure as to whether we should consider it reliable. For starters, even the author admits it "Are these interactions based on biophotons? Clearly this was not measured and to my knowledge is not currently measurable, for the electromagnetic spatial dimension of cells is so far not reachable either for precise assessment or application." It's pretty clear that this is a fringe theory, an IMO having it in the article is undue when we have nothing about the other ways in which they communicate through chemical means. Bus stop, can you explain why you think it should remain in the article? Smartse (talk) 20:35, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

Smartse—in truth I definitely don't know. But I just raised a question here, on our Science reference desk. Bus stop (talk) 21:05, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

And as an example of why scientific papers can't be trusted as RSs all the time see this which was discussing a paper published in PNAS, generally considered more reliable than PLoS. Smartse (talk) 20:41, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

The article was "Received: November 2, 2008; Accepted: February 2, 2009; Published: April 1, 2009" -- nothing sounds too deliberately or outrageously funny about that. As to being "fringe" or notable enough for inclusion in the article -- is this the best article for it? Presumably it would be something more widespread and not occur in just this one organism; maybe the "biophoton" article would be a better place for it (but I haven't seen that one)? WikiDao ☯ (talk) 20:57, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

Note: Illustration of a pair o' meece-i-yum, with a cat eye-on. :) ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 21:13, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

As opposed to an Anion. : ) Bus stop (talk) 21:19, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

Every April Fools joke I've ever seen had way more obvious clues that are present here. I don't believe it's a joke. Even the weird-looking things, such as the author coming from the Swiss Tropical Institute, turn out to make sense. I don't particularly believe the result, and the paper certainly wouldn't meet WP:MEDRS if that were the applicable criterion, but it doesn't look like a joke. Looie496 (talk) 21:33, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

---

I emailed the author about this and got the following reply (note that some of it is a reply to text on the science reference desk):

Dear Ariel

Thanks for your interest.
Here my answers.

1) It is not a fools joke.

2) For the time being I am the only one who does this type of experiments with Paramecia but by far not the only one who does this type of experiment.

3) Actually, you can see my paper also as a repetition of previous studies but with another organism.

4) I apologize for not contributing on your blog.

A remark after reading your discussion.
        Single author does not mean bad work.
        Experiment 1 was 14 times repeated.
                This is a big sample size.

Please, do not talk in such a sloppy way about other people's work.
It took about 700 working hours to do all experiments, read into the literature, permanently hand out my paper to my critical collegues checking for errors, making it waterproof, double-check the statistics and so on ...
Note, the field is old (1923) but only few people work on it. These people have to convince the Scientific community about the reality of so-called bio-photons.
Join in in a construcitve way.

Yours friendly
Daniel Fels

PS: Maybe you and your friends have a (long) glance at this recent review.

Attached was a pdf titled: "Electromagnetic cellular interactions" by "Michal Cifra, Jeremy Z. Fields, Ashkan Farhadi". doi:10.1016/j.pbiomolbio.2010.07.003 Ariel. (talk) 09:56, 29 September 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for contacting the author Ariel. I still feel it is undue to include it in this article and think it would be a better idea to use the review to expand the biophoton article. Personally I find this field very interesting but after thinking about this in general for a number of years and then today reading the review I still find it pretty questionable. More importantly, it's not our job to convince anyone about anything - we should be presenting the most accepted view of a topic. In this case, an article about Paramecium, one paper which proposes EM communication is undue when there are over 5000 papers which directly study paramecium. Smartse (talk) 11:36, 29 September 2010 (UTC)

Smartse, shouldn't there be some mention, however brief, of this study in the Paramecium article? A link could accompany such a mention, sending the reader to the Biophoton article. Thank you to Ariel for obtaining that additional information on this. Bus stop (talk) 11:56, 29 September 2010 (UTC)

Maybe, but the thing is that if it occurs its not specific to Paramecium, which in my opinion any mention would make it seem. The review mentioned lists many similar experiments but I don't think they should be mentioned in every article about the organisms used in the experiments. As an example, one found that human blood affected the germination of radish seeds, but we shouldn't add this to the radish and blood articles. Paramecium appear to just be the organism that was chosen for the experiment, rather than this being an important, well verified piece of information about Paramecium. Smartse (talk) 16:17, 29 September 2010 (UTC)

Well, that could be said. Would it be unreasonable to note in the Paramecium article that experiments were carried out that indicate a degree of communicative ability across distances, assumed to be attributable to electromagnetic radiation, but that it is not at all clear that this is unique to this particular organism, or even whether that has been conclusively established. I see nothing wrong with a little tangent in an article. It could be enclosed in brackets perhaps—to set it apart from content directly relating to the topic. I think every reader would find this interesting. And the link (to Biophoton) could be used or not used, at the reader's discretion. Bus stop (talk) 16:49, 29 September 2010 (UTC)

(Coming here from the Ref Desk.) I'm inclined to agree with Smartse's position. Much as our article on Mus musculus doesn't – and shouldn't – address every single study that used the mouse as a model organism, this article shouldn't try to include and reference every use of Paramecium in the scientific literature.

In this case, we have a small study that reports an unusual result. The scientific community hasn't had the opportunity to replicate the result or to review the findings in the context of a high-quality secondary source. (That is, this work doesn't form the foundation for additional papers by arms-length research groups, nor has it yet been presented as an important or reliable conclusion in peer-reviewed general literature reviews of Paramecium biology or biophysics.) It would therefore be premature for a general reference work like Wikipedia to incorporate this new finding into our article at this time; creating an entire article section to discuss this result is far too much emphasis on a single newly-published primary source. TenOfAllTrades(talk) 19:08, 29 September 2010 (UTC)

Good example of junk science. 1. The biggest problem is that he did not set out to test a preformulated hypothesis, he started collecting noisy data and then invented super-specialized hypotheses for the statistical tests that might explainec that particular (and only that) data set. 2. The experimental setup does not allow to draw any conclusion about the proposed mechanism. The only valid way would have been to use filters on the *outside* of the cuvettes as controls. 3. The experimental setup was not adequate, the intermittent background during opening/handling light was probably orders of magnitudes brighter than any paramecium light. 4. There is no measurement or characterization of paramecium light emission and how that differs from bacteria light or plain medium light. 5. What is his hypothesis/conclusion? That a certain type of light affects growth? In the presence of background radiation orders of magnitude higher? Much easier to test with artificial light sources. Or does he imply a kind of morse code that parameciums can detect and decode without interference from the hundreds of other parameciums and other organisms in close proximity? Without any obvious (directional) sensing organ or mechanism? Conclusion: All there is is noisy data. And some wild speculation that is not at all backed up by the data. This article definitely has no place in Wikipedia. Cacycle (talk) 19:43, 29 September 2010 (UTC)

Cacycle—I think that is original research. Not that you are the first to engage in what I think is WP:OR in relation to this question, but I don't think that really supersedes sources. Bus stop (talk) 20:01, 29 September 2010 (UTC)

Not sure what you mean, WP:OR applies to articles, not to discussions. Cacycle (talk) 21:51, 29 September 2010 (UTC)

True. Good point. But you are virtually conducting or at least evaluating a scientific experiment. Doesn't that require expertise? The spirit of the concept of "original research" involves substituting what we assume to be our own knowledge for that which may be contained in "reliable sources." Your argument is perfectly fine here on the Talk page. I don't mean to silence you (not that I could). But as it translates into excluding what seems to me to be pretty well-sourced information (PLoS ONE and Scientific American) it seems akin to original research. Bus stop (talk) 22:06, 29 September 2010 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure that Cacycle's criticisms are scientifically reasonable in every particular, but I was trying to be polite since the author of the article may be reading and I wanted to be gentle towards someone who is probably quite young and inexperienced so I tried to couch my arguments in terms of a failure to meet our secondary sourcing standards.

'Conducting' and 'evaluating' science experiments are two very different processes; one requires equipment, the other just requires knowledge. While it would be inappropriate for us to engage in actively debunking sources in our articles using only our own skills and knowledge, it is not beyond our scope to evaluate the quality of sources in deciding whether or not to include their findings in our articles in the first place. Deciding which statements and sources our articles should contain are among our largest and most important responsibilities as Wikipedia editors — WP:WEIGHT is a key plank of WP:NPOV, and even WP:OR cautions us about placing primary source materials in appropriate context.

This is a primary research paper from an author with a very limited publication track record, including no apparent experience in biophotonics or photobiology. There are issues with the methodology, analysis, and interpretation of the data presented. The conclusions are vague. (PLoS ONE is a great idea, but its catch-all mandate makes it something of a black sheep among the otherwise uniformly superb PLoS journals.) The paper has not been subsequently reviewed in a peer-reviewed science journal (Scientific American, while both fun to read and significantly more conscientious than New Scientist, doesn't count) and we have no sources which describe the reception of this paper by experts in (for example) Paramecium biology. The Scientific American source, meanwhile, is a one-paragraph blurb that essentially recites the largest claims of the PLoS ONE paper without further comment. In the absence of reliable secondary source material on this topic, we need to use our own knowledge and common sense to evaluate these sources, and right now they just don't clear the bar. TenOfAllTrades(talk) 22:38, 29 September 2010 (UTC)

I think that a consensus has been reached that it should be removed, so will take it out the article. Thanks for the comments. Smartse (talk) 16:55, 30 September 2010 (UTC)

Actually I think you should transfer it to the biophoton article. Ariel. (talk) 01:51, 3 October 2010 (UTC)

2 questions

What's a good magnification power for observing paramecium? And, why isn't there any info on reproduction? Noloop (talk) 04:14, 6 September 2011 (UTC)

1. Try asking at the science reference desk instead. 2. Because no one has written anything! Feel free to be bold and fix it. SmartSE (talk) 16:52, 6 September 2011 (UTC)

life expectancy

Seems that aging starts around 80 generations as non viable clones happen around 220 gen unless fertilisation happens. That's about 40 days. Right? -- user:grin 19:46, 17 July 2012 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.132.138.200 (talk)

Edits

Here is a list of the changes I've made:

• Removed specified "brown" color from taxobox (taxobox color for Chromalveolata is automatically green)
• Moved species list from taxobox to the text of the article, to make room for a comprehensive list.
• Removed unreferenced claim concerning new species discovered "in the oceans." (Marine paramecia have been

known for at least 150 years)

• Added a new section on Historical Background
• Created a separate section for Appearance and Physical Characteristics, and brought the description in line with the subject of the page, which is the genus Paramecium, and not any particular species.
• Since some of the information in "Physiology" duplicated passages in earlier paragraphs, I have consolidated these sections, removing redundancies (e.g., contractile vacuoles were described 3 times)
• Removed possibly true but unreferenced claim that paramecia travel at speeds of 12 body lengths per second (not really pertinent here, anyway)
• Corrected the claim that Paramecia have 2 contractile vacuoles (while some well-known species are

equipped with a pair of cv's, some have only 1, and others have several).

• Edited passage on osmoregulation for clarity.
• Removed claim that "the cell approximates a prolate spheroid" Not all species have that shape (although their micronuclei do!).
• Removed true but tangential claim that "Certain single-cell eukaryotes such as Paramecium are examples for exceptions

to the universality of the genetic code: in their translation systems a few codons differ from the standard ones."

• Removed unsupported claim that Paramecium is often confused with Blepharisma (the genera are not very similar in appearance)
• Rewrote and expanded section on Movement, with citations.
• Provided citations for Feeding section, and edited for stylistic reasons
• Amplified Symbiosis section, removed the colloquial observation that symbiosis of Tetraurelia is "interesting", but kept the citation. The subject is, indeed, interesting and deserves further elaboration!
• Amplified Reproduction section. As written previously, the section focused on one species, P. tetraurelia
• Made just one small change to the excellent Aging and Meiosis & rejuvenation sections...replaced "automixis" with the more common,

and specific, term term "autogamy."

• Added a list of valid morphospecies. This is not a list of all taxonomically accepted names, but of well-described species (based on Fokin et al, 2004)

Deuterostome (talk) 17:26, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Habitat

Where would you find a paramecium? Are they all around the world? Fresh water lakes? Seas and oceans? We need a section on habitat.Beager (talk) 02:42, 19 March 2013 (UTC)

Hi, Beager. Thanks for the suggestion.  :) The opening paragraph already includes some basic information about habitat (freshwater, brackish & marine). When I have a few minutes to spare I'll expand on that, and add a mention of the cosmopolitan distribution of the genus. Paramecium species are found pretty much everywhere, from ice-bound Antarctic lakes to geothermal sulphur springs. Deuterostome (talk) 16:01, 19 March 2013 (UTC)

Parameciums or Paramecia

Is the plural of paramecium parameciums or paramecia? I've seen paramecia used in this article, but parameciums used in other places.67.85.219.4 (talk) 17:58, 23 February 2021 (UTC)

Both are correct. I did a couple of searches in Google and Google Scholar, and returns indicate that Paramecia is more common, by many orders of magnitude. Deuterostome (Talk) 21:15, 23 February 2021 (UTC)

I'll add a clarification, in light of Dyanega's helpful edit of Sept. 8. If you are using the scientific name of the genus, the plural form is the same as the singular: Paramecium (italicized, capital "P"). However, informally (in the vernacular, as Dyanega says), the plural form paramecia (lower case, no italics) is commonly used. So, from a major textbook on the genus: "At the beginning of the 18th century and extending into the 19th, many early microscopists encountered and described ciliates that appear to have been paramecia." (Wichterman, The Biology of Paramecium, p. 1) Deuterostome (Talk) 16:38, 10 September 2023 (UTC)