11 Facts About Multicellular organisms

Multicellular organisms organism is an organism that consists of more than one cell, in contrast to a unicellular organism.

All species of animals, land plants and most fungi are multicellular, as are many algae, whereas a few organisms are partially uni- and partially multicellular, like slime molds and social amoebae such as the genus Dictyostelium.

Multicellular organisms arise in various ways, for example by cell division or by aggregation of many single cells.

Colonial Multicellular organisms are the result of many identical individuals joining together to form a colony.

However, complex multicellular organisms evolved only in six eukaryotic groups: animals, symbiomycotan fungi, brown algae, red algae, green algae, and land plants.

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The earliest fossils of multicellular organisms include the contested Grypania spiralis and the fossils of the black shales of the Palaeoproterozoic Francevillian Group Fossil B Formation in Gabon .

Over time these organisms would become so dependent on each other they would not be able to survive independently, eventually leading to the incorporation of their genomes into one multicellular organism.

For instance, the two or three symbiotic Multicellular organisms forming the composite lichen, although dependent on each other for survival, have to separately reproduce and then re-form to create one individual organism once more.

Predation hypothesis suggests that in order to avoid being eaten by predators, simple single-celled organisms evolved multicellularity to make it harder to be consumed as prey.

Multicellular organisms thus have the competitive advantages of an increase in size without its limitations.

Whether all of these can be seen as advantages however is debatable: The vast majority of living Multicellular organisms are single celled, and even in terms of biomass, single celled Multicellular organisms are far more successful than animals, although not plants.