In 1889, Joseph Leidy, an extraordinary American naturalist, cut open the guts of termites to find out what they were eating. As he watched the dissected insects under a microscope, he was shocked to see small specks fleeing from the corpses like ‘a multitude of persons from the door of a crowded meeting-house’. He billed them as ‘parasites’ but we now know that these tiny evacuees are protists: eukaryotic microbes that are more complex than bacteria but still consist of a single cell. The protists can make up half the weight of their termite host, and they are abundant for a reason: they have
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Termites
