To confirm the perplexing behavior, Moses and his team drew up samples of the fluid surrounding dividing amoebas in a pipette and then placed the tip of the instrument in a separate solution of amoebas. Several of the tiny organisms immediately responded by flocking toward the tip of the pipette. That led Moses to propose in an article in this week's journal Nature , that something in the fluid around dividing amoebas serves as a chemical attractant to others. Primitive communication among primitive species is not unknown. Moses says investigators in Germany have observed similar behavior in some amoeba-like species of slime molds.
Bacteria also appear to communicate.
Who's Talking In a process known as quorum sensing, bacteria, once thought to be lone operators, release signals in order to assess how many of them there are. Once the number of signals reaches a critical level, the bacteria unleash toxins that damage their host. Peter Greenberg, a microbiologist at the University of Iowa who studies quorum sensing, believes the observed bacteria signaling, and the apparent discovery of amoeba communication indicates that populations of primitive, microscopic organisms may be much more complex than we might think. It will be interesting to learn more about the mechanism and see if there is a relationship between the two signaling systems. ABC News Internet Ventures.