Single-Celled Marine Organisms Resulted in an Influential Illustrated Book

Summary

No creatures from the microscopic world have managed to captivate the human imagination as authoritatively as radiolarians. Since the late nineteenth century, they’ve made their existence known in art, architecture, design, and even literature. These single-celled marine organisms, which appear to have teleported straight from some rarified Euclidean space into all the world’s oceans, seamlessly fuse geometry and biology. Their astonishingly complex glassine skeletons may serve to protect and regulate buoyancy for the cell inside, but they also seem a kind of physical embodiment in sculpted glass of what radiance means. Radiolarians are adept at distilling silica, a form of quartz, from seawater, a process known as biomineralization. In this process, they generate a kind of mad geometer’s vocabulary of forms—polyhedra, Archimedean solids, icosahedrons, dodecahedrons, and the like—tongue-twisting shapes perforated by radiating spines and microtubules. Their extraordinary morphologies serve to refute any suggestion that biological forms must simplify as they grow smaller. Acrosphaera spinosa fasciculopora radiolarian, Equatorial Pacific1833 x. 120 microns wide, 0.12 of a millimeter. Michael Benson. If anything, the opposite appears to be true. They can be found wherever salt water makes waves, but particularly in the warmer surface layers of the Indian and Pacific Oceans. No single species predominates. Complexity packaged within geometry is a radiolarian signature. Radiolarian skeletons are typically constructed of an orderly mesh of rigid polygons. These are frequently shaped into nested spheres—though there are many exceptions, including intricate axial symmetries. The central sphere contains the cell’s endoplasm and nucleus, site of the greatest cellular activity. Surrounding that and protected by an outer shell is the cytoplasm, a frothy liquid of protein-synthesizing ribosomes, energy-producing mitochondria, energy-storing lipids, and the like. Most radiolarian...