I think this article is a nice collection of interesting facts about bacteria and I learnt a few new things, don’t get me wrong. It would be even better if it discussed the missing points I mentioned in my comment and reframed the behaviours explained here in the framework of bacteria not developing in the void, there is no need of playing loose with the technical terminology. I would refrain from using multicellularity and other terms that can trigger this knee-jerk reaction from people working on these topics like me.
Thanks for the feedback, the examples you cited are really cool. I didn’t know about akinetes but I’m reading more about them now. For the general point of the article, they might actually be too good examples of multicellularity: there is a pretty strong case that these are multicellular organism by the usual definition. What I wanted to emphasize here is that, even for species like E. coli that are most definitely not multicellular, we can still force ourselves to look at it through a multicellular lens and find interesting things. I agree that it’s awkward to change the definition of a technical term as liberally as I did, so I’ll try to see if I can come up with a better phrasing.
I think this article is a nice collection of interesting facts about bacteria and I learnt a few new things, don’t get me wrong. It would be even better if it discussed the missing points I mentioned in my comment and reframed the behaviours explained here in the framework of bacteria not developing in the void, there is no need of playing loose with the technical terminology. I would refrain from using multicellularity and other terms that can trigger this knee-jerk reaction from people working on these topics like me.
But the article is cool and I enjoyed it :)
Thanks for the feedback, the examples you cited are really cool. I didn’t know about akinetes but I’m reading more about them now. For the general point of the article, they might actually be too good examples of multicellularity: there is a pretty strong case that these are multicellular organism by the usual definition. What I wanted to emphasize here is that, even for species like E. coli that are most definitely not multicellular, we can still force ourselves to look at it through a multicellular lens and find interesting things. I agree that it’s awkward to change the definition of a technical term as liberally as I did, so I’ll try to see if I can come up with a better phrasing.