the idea of protists is really funny. Ah yes, the kingdoms of life: Animals, Plants, Fungi, and Don’t worry about it:)
i just started taking my first botany course and politely op what the fuck is this supposed to mean
Well
Um
…
All creatures with cells that have the fancy stuff like nucleus and mitochondria are Eukaryotes. That picture is from the Wikipedia page for Eukaryotes.
Long ago there was just the Bacteria and Archaea. Then something weird happened and an Archaean ate a bacterium but the bacterium was not consumed, instead they became friends. By “friends” I mean “permanently merged together into an entirely new kind of life form that can do all kinds of fancy stuff with its cells.” This life form is your ancestor and the ancestor of all Eukaryotes.
One of those new, fancy life forms ate a cyanobacteria and made it into chloroplasts. This created the plants.
A few others decided to go multicellular and form tubes out of cells that could wriggle around, and they became animals.
A few decided to also go multicellular and team up into big networks of interconnected thread-like tendrils, and they became fungi.
But most of them just kind of went off and did their own thing, going about their single-celled business, evolving into all kinds of weird stuff without doing anything multicellular. And all of those guys got called protists. Every eukaryote that didn’t become multicellular is a protist.
The guys that went multicellular are just a few weirdos in these random corners of the tree of life, but they get all the attention cause we multicellular organisms are kind of self-absorbed (and we had to do some strange things to sand to turn it into lenses to see the single-celled organisms).
If each of those multicellular clades counts as a “kingdom,” how many kingdoms do the single-celled guys make? Good luck with that one. We keep finding more of them.
Every time we look at some more pond water, the taxonomists collapse into sobbing again. There are too many ways to be a little guy. Every time there’s a cilium or a flagellum somewhere it’s not supposed to be, or there’s something suspicious going on with microtubules or zoospores or helical structures something, or god forbid two guys get freaky and do another endosymbiosis again, they have to rewrite everything and there’s at least two fistfights and one brawl.
Protists: Just don’t worry about it.
Also I lied and there are plenty of eukaryotes that are multicellular and not animals, plants, or fungi, such as giant kelp
However those get called protists half the time too because with kelp, it’s easier than trying to explain what the fuck it is if it isn’t a plant, and with everything else, talking about it just starts an argument about what counts as a “cell” and what counts as “multi” for that matter and nothing good comes of it.
