can you teach amoebas tricks?

Question

amoebas will respond to a strong light source,and try to move out of the light,so can you teach them to respond to other stimuli and therefore predetermine their actions?

Answer 1

the only statement about associative learning in unicellular organisms like the amoeba that I was able to find quickly is below, and that says no, you can't teach amoebas tricks. Their learning processes seem to be limited to habituation. Sorry.

The capacity for habituation of stimuli is important for the survival of organisms so that habituation appears to have been adopted at an early level of evolution. In this paper the question is raised and experimentally tested, whether or not unicellular organisms can habituate. A positive answer leads to the conclusion that a simple form of learning, such as habituation, is not necessarily associated with nervous systems, which do not exist in unicellular eukaryotes. At the same time, evidence for higher forms of learning, such as the association of two stimuli, has failed to be established experimentally in unicellular organisms.

Answer 2

Heck yeah!! You can actually train, (not really teach, because amoebas have the mental power of P***** R**** W****) to do lots of things.

One of the sad things about this is that amoebas are microscopic so you can't share this fact with too large a crowd at one time.

Also, they have a relatively short life span.....you know the old saying,"Ashes to ashes, amoebas to dust" and " A bird in the hand is likely to make a mess". This, along with the fact that when they fiss ----is that right? doesn't really look like it-------well anyhow when they do you know what the resulting two amoebas are like blank slates.

Even so, it's one of the few joys that a pentaplegic like me can have, just watching my current amoeba, Paul, fetch little pieces of whatever is around and bring them to me. He also can roll over and fart on command (That one is a riot at parties!)

One word of caution: I wouldn't start right off with a purebred amoeba if I were you......They are two expensive and also tend to be extremely temperamental...Go with a good quality half breed or even a quadroon.

Answer 3

Hard to teach an old amoeba new tricks. No brain, no thinking functions, just a survival response. No trick at all.

Answer 4

No

they will only respond to light becasue they cannot survive in direct light so other stimuli they will not respond to because they are not genetaically built to respond to other stimuli

Answer 5

Yes. I know of an amoeba that can stay, sit, and do summersaults when ordered to.

Answer 6

its a three molecule circus!