Dealing Neither With Nethers Nor Drinks

Today's topic is Vaginicola.  Get your laughs and jokes out of the way now.  This is serious business.  DEADLY serious.

Alright, not deadly serious, but we can't sit back all day and make jokes about carbonated douching.  Particularly since colas don't make effective spermicides. Cracked has covered it, the Mythbusters have covered it (note: illegal streaming, watch at your own risk, 47min mark), and even if you don't trust them, Snopes has covered it too.  I've even tracked down the actual research which can be found here (PDF) (which in turn disagrees with earlier research which can be found here (PDF) ).  Basically, I'm not wasting a whole lot of time on this particular piece of incorrect information.

Alright, vaginicola.  What is it?  Well, it's derived from two Latin words, vagina and colere, which mean sheath and to inhabit respectively.  See, now you're thinking entirely different dirty thoughts, aren't you?  Come on!  Minds out of the gutter here people!  This is science!  Well, non-dirty science.  I'll leave the dirty science to the Kinsey Institute (for now...).

Alright, time for the big reveal.  Are you ready to see some vaginicola?  Some award winning vaginicola imagery?  A picture of a nice, wet vaginicola?  Alright, now I'm getting dirty, so here you go, taken from the 2006 Biomedical Image Awards... vaginicola!

The bluish bit is the sheath, the green
bit in the bottom image is the vaginicola itself.

If you're like me, you look at that an go, "Wow.  That's awesome."  Shortly thereafter you go, "Now, what the heck is it?"  First off, that's not the actual colour.  It's been digitally altered to better show the different bits.  With that disclaimer out of the way, it's a protist (which is a convenient word that biologists have frowned upon for almost 50years, but they don't really have a good alternative yet, so I'm using it).  That means it's really small.  How small?  They're measured in μm (micrometers), and the sheath that they secrete for themselves is about as long as a human hair is wide.  Yeah, they're super tiny.

They live in fresh water and they eat... ummm... algae?  Bacteria?  Not entirely sure, since there's almost no actual information about them online other than a vague definition and a few pictures.  The lack of information is actually kind of nice, since it means that I've pretty much said all there is to say, and the only things I can still say about it are just useless gobbledygook unless you're a biologist.  So here's another picture, with two vaginicolas living in one lorica (the proper name for the sheath).

Two vaginicolas are better than one!
Click to embiggen, clicky-poppy.

 Vaginicola: Sounds messy, isn't.

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Sources:
Colour enhanced image of vaginicola taken from the 2006 Biomedical Image Awards
Image of two vaginicola taken from the Protist Image Database


Dictionary.com
Wikipedia article on Peritrichs, the closest thing they have to vaginicolas, which are a subset of a subset of peritrichs