Question

Are protists harmful?

Answer 1

Any eukaryotic organism that is not an animal, plant, or fungus is referred to as a protist. Though it is possible that protists share a common ancestor, protists do not form a natural group or clade. They have a wide range of species. Although there are exceptions, protists are usually microscopic and unicellular. Protist cells are well-organized, with a nucleus and specialized cellular machinery known as organelles.

Complete answer:
- In many protist species, the number of individuals approaches staggering proportions. There are tens of thousands of protists in a gram of arable soil, hundreds of thousands in a termite's intestine, millions in a bovine mammal's rumen, billions in a tiny patch of floating plankton in the sea, and trillions in the bloodstream of someone with extreme malaria.
- Protists, especially blood parasites, are responsible for a number of serious human diseases. Malaria, trypanosomiasis (African sleeping sickness), leishmaniasis, toxoplasmosis, and amoebic dysentery are all diseases that can be debilitating or fatal.
- Giardiasis is a parasitic infection caused by giardia protists. Humans ingest them by consuming or drinking faeces-contaminated food or water. Infected humans can suffer diarrhoea, gas, stomach cramps, nausea, vomiting, and dehydration because Giardia may withstand typical disinfection methods. Irritation of the eyes and skin are also common symptoms.
- Infecting domesticated animals, poultry, hatchery fish, and other food sources with protist parasites deplete supplies or made them unpalatable. The financial losses will be inevitable.

Thus from the above discussion, we can conclude that protists can be harmful but dominantly they provide great benefits.

Note:
- When an amoeba is divided in two, the half with the nucleus survives, while the other half dies.
- A type of algae that grows in the ocean is known as seaweed.
- Protists are the oldest living beings on the planet. They are species that do not belong in any other category because they lack features found in plants, animals, or fungi.