Event period: from 17 to 19 July 2016
At the moment, I’ve opted for a camera trap. It activates on movement and stays off as long as nothing happens, so I’ll be guaranteed that the battery will last long enough and will only run down when the amoeba (that’s how I’m going to refer to the fabric from now on) moves. It took me a while to fine-tune the camera’s sensitivity, but I’ve finally got it right.
And I’m going to need that energy efficiency, because from now on I won’t have this animal in my room. I have found a small, abandoned warehouse that nobody claims and that nobody enters because it is a dump. I will have to do some cleaning and remove a lot of dirt, and I can only get in through a window, but at least I will be in peace, away from prying eyes and without cleaning ladies on the coast. What worries me most about all this is that some of the local animals, especially rats, might try to open the box in which I have the amoeba, so as a precautionary measure I put its home inside a second plastic box to protect it from the outside.
As for our protagonist, I have been observing it for a few days now to see if I can discover anything about its behaviour and, for the time being, I must correct some of my previous statements. To begin with, there is the grim possibility that it adhered to the mummy of the sphere while the human was still alive. I know this because I have been testing different foods these days to better define the amoeba’s diet, and I have come to some conclusions about it and its behaviour. Namely:
It shows no interest in inorganic debris of any kind, such as minerals, rocks, plastics, etc.
It also shows no interest in dead organic beings. It does not matter whether they are vegetables, meat, fungi or other types of remains. Likewise, it does not matter whether these remains are in good condition, fresh or in an advanced process of decomposition. It simply ignores them, as in the previous cases mentioned.
On the contrary, it shows activity and interest in living animals, usually treating them as a potential source of food. With plants, it is quite the opposite, and maintains a passive attitude. The only exception to this statement is when on the surface of the offered plants there are some kind of animal such as ants, aphids or other insects.
The variety of prey that the amoeba can consume, within the evidently carnivorous diet that it shows, is extremely wide. So far it has consumed small animals both terrestrial and marine without rejecting almost any of them. We are talking about mussels, shrimps, various kinds of insects, etc.
In relation to the previous, the only condition limiting feeding is that the prey can be completely encompassed by the amoeba’s body, which is currently 25 cm2. This demonstrates minimal intelligence or ability to measure or discriminate, choosing to avoid conflict and remain static whenever potential prey exceeds it in size.
Based on the previous point, I deduce that what happened on the day it appeared inside a mussel shell was that it slipped into the centre of the shell, taking advantage of its ability to filter through narrow crevices, and devoured the mussel inside.
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It is also clear from the preceding that this animal appears to be capable of an amphibious lifestyle, as it moves naturally both on land and in water. The means of locomotion is the same: it crawls along the ground on its own body like a slug, snail or starfish. Its movements are therefore slow but constant.
Regardless of the food, this amoeba seems to full use of its prey’s resources. It leaves no trace or residue even if the animal has unusable parts such as shells, hard appendages or shells. If it can embrace the prey with its body, all of it is apparently digested. I don’t know why it ignored the mussel shell in its first feeding. My only hypothesis is that it was too weak to undertake such a digestive effort, but I cannot be conclusive about that.
It still does not show a circadian pattern. Activity can be renewed or stopped randomly, being the only appreciable conditioning factor of the fact that I am present or not, opting for stillness in the first situation and for movement in the second. Based on this, I still assume that he considers me a threat or potential danger. In this situation, most of my observations result from videos recorded at different times of the day or night, which I have classified for the moment in four folders corresponding to six-hour intervals of the day: early morning (from 00:01 to 6:00), morning (from 6:01 to 12:00), afternoon (from 12:01 to 18:00) and night (from 18:01 to 00:00).
The hunting strategy is practically non-existent. It approaches its prey, envelops it completely out of sight and digests it completely after a time that depends on the prey and its external protection. The most similar to a strategy that I have observed is that the amoeba remains motionless, waiting for its prey to approach, to be trapped on its surface, and then to envelop it. However, this only happens if the prey approaches the amoeba of its own free will, as there is no discernible attempt by the amoeba to attract, conceal or mimic its environment.
Its size, as mentioned above, is 5 × 5 centimetres. It is curious, but at no time has it lost the square shape with which I cut it from the rest of the shroud. As problematic or impractical as this artificial shape may be for it, it has not changed or altered it in any way. Nor has it shown any growth or regeneration, despite the feeding. Everything seems to show that neither the shape nor the cut matters, as no vital functions are affected and therefore nothing in its appearance needs to be reconditioned.
In relation to that, where there has been a change has been in the colour of its surface. After days of continuous feeding, the original brownish ashen colour has faded in favour of a navy-blue colour so dark that, depending on the amount of light, it seems to become bluer or blacker. I have tried to find parallels with other living creatures and have even used programmes with algorithms capable of classifying and defining exactly the colour of the pixels in a photograph, but no luck: the programmes seem to cannot recognise the colour of this animal, no matter what the light conditions or the quality of the photograph, so for the time being I will say that it is a colour not registered on the traditional colour wheel and refer to it as navy blue, but I want to state for the record that it is not really such a colour. I only use the name for convenience and comfort.
From all this I derive the amoeba enveloped the body of the human being while that person was alive, because, if the human being had already been dead, the amoeba, in theory, would not have shown any interest. This information, of course, complicates the chain of events, because if the amoeba is so ancient, it clearly could not have enveloped a human being that arose evolutionarily millions of years later. It could, however, happen that the geological dynamics were capricious and wrapped the human body with the remains of the amoeba that were already in place, but I admit it sounds very crazy and convenient considering that when I discovered them it seemed as if the amoeba had consciously wrapped the mummy of the human being.
Until I come to better conclusions, I’ll leave it here and I’ll let you know what new things I discover.