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Narration:
Paramecia swim happily in ponds and streams throughout world. Their quick movements are produced by an army of hair-like oars that beat to the rhythm of intracellular chemistry.
Called cilia, the tiny parts with purpose create water currents that bring a constant supply of gifts in the form of bacteria and other organic matter.
Entry into a paramecium begins in the oral groove which leads to a bustling chamber called a food vacuole. An unsuspecting bacterium might frolic for a while in this churning chamber, but its days are numbered… correction… its minutes are numbered.
For the paramecium greets its visitors with a team of molecular adaptations that can only be described as precision instruments of death.
Otherwise known as digestive proteins, they act on the residents of the food vacuole with steely determination. Chomping and munching, snipping and cutting, the paramecium’s bounty is rendered lifeless. A food vacuole turns living cells into a thick broth of non-living nutrients.
Transport proteins shuttle the essential molecules across the vacuole membrane into an ocean of cytoplasm. Other teams of proteins greet the nutrients with a thousand purposes, from energy production to building projects.
The machinery within paramecia operates at a feverish pace. Contractile vacuoles pump the paramecium away from certain doom, an explosive fate due to the invasion of water molecules. Designed by natural selection, its protein parts efficiently carry out all needed chemical reactions. Out of countless random encounters throughout the vastness of the cytoplasm, a paramecium’s LIFE emerges into existence.
But just as quickly as paramecia transform bacteria into construction supplies, so too, might paramecia suffer the same fate… thanks to the cold pseudopods of amoeba. Perhaps they ponder the irony of digesting tiny victims while they, themselves, are being digested. More than one… followed by many many zeros… paramecia... have ended their time on earth as a corpse within the dynamic molecular city that is amoeba. When paramecia’s proteins parts cease to function… the game of life is over.
And so it is… in the incessant war that constitutes nature… that living cells attack each other, engulf, destroy and build anew. For organisms that cannot harness the power of the sun, the price of life… is the loss of life!

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