ALTERNATE PHASES IN FOLLICULINA

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Abstract
In the protozoan Folliculina an individual imprisoned continued to pass from differentiated to dedifferentiated phases, though both were exposed to the same restricted conditions. Imprisoned in the night of August 28 the feeding adult dedifferentiated into a swimming form which was active within the prison all the forenoon of August 29. It then passed into the sedentary phase and omitting to construct the usual dwelling, being inside the old one, differentiated again into the perfect form by ten o'clock. During that night it again dedifferentiated into the swimming form, still within the old dwelling to the bottom of which it had twice fastened itself. At 8:40 in the morning of August 30 this swimming form had partly emerged through a rent in the dwelling. This protruding anterior part of the animal swam violently, held tethered to the dying posterior half left within the dwelling. At ten forty the free-swimming part settled down on the outside of the dwelling and carried out the normal series of acts in fabricating a new dwelling attached to the old one and almost completed at 12:40. But at one P.M. the animal was destroyed and rhythmic alternation thus ended. It is inferred that these alternations of form with differentiation and dedifferentiation are not directly dependent upon such external conditions as exposure to long stretches of water, feeding, nor probably, upon direct concomitants of day and night successions. The nature of the internal factors responsible for this apparent striving to complete the normal alternations of phase, and the causes underlying the omission of the usual making of a dwelling, which would in this case be redundant, remain to be found out. Were there a complex nervous system we might refer much of these activities to it.

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