that the ‘cilia’ are not cilia at all. They are bacteria. Each one of the hundreds of thousands of tiny hairs is a single spirochaete—a bacterium whose entire body is a long, wiggling hair. Some important diseases, such as syphilis, are caused by spirochaetes. They normally swim freely, but Mixotricha’s spirochaetes are stuck to its body wall, exactly as though they were cilia.
