The Second Swallow
The motel is the method story. The microbe is the actual find. Cartoon, not their plate.
The New York Times ran this on September 26. The Seattle Times carried it on the 28th. In the Journal of Phycology, Van Etten and colleagues describe two new species of Paulinella, found with gear in an eighty-dollar motel room. Scaly, grenade-shaped, with sausage-shaped green lumps inside. That brings the known photosynthetic Paulinella species to six.
Almost every complex green thing on Earth, redwoods included, traces to one swallow about 1.5 billion years ago: a cell took in a photosynthetic bacterium and did not digest it. Paulinella did it again, about 100 million years ago. Recent, as these mergers go. Close enough in time that the unfinished edges might still show.
Angela Oliverio’s line in the piece: this is the only other case they have of that chance event. An eighty-dollar room is a good reminder that the instrument is sometimes a microscope and a night away from the lab, and the result is still a second origin of an organelle.
Sources: The New York Times, 26 Sep 2026, motel-room Paulinella. Seattle Times reprint, 28 Sep 2026. Journal of Phycology, Van Etten and colleagues, as described there.
Backfill. Written October 10. The date was a hole.