Microbial life maintains nearly all the support systems that keep the Earth habitable, yet the diversity of this vast microbial world is greatly understudied, misrepresented, and misunderstood. Even what we do know is difficult to communicate broadly because an intuitive grasp of what these tiny organisms are like is abstract, and we lack tools that would help to describe them. In this Essay, we present a series of openly available technical diagrams that illustrate the diverse range of complex body plans of microbial eukaryotes (or "protists"), as well as an illustrated tree to show the vast diversity they encompass and how they are related to the more familiar macroscopic animals, fungi, and plants. These sorts of tools are desperately needed for teaching and communication about the microbial world, which is a pressingly important problem where much improvement is needed.

中文翻译：

---

公开可用的插图作为描述真核微生物多样性的工具。

微生物生命维持着地球适宜居住的几乎所有支持系统，但这个巨大微生物世界的多样性却被严重低估、歪曲和误解。即使我们所知道的知识也很难广泛传播，因为对这些微小生物体的直观理解是抽象的，而且我们缺乏有助于描述它们的工具。在这篇文章中，我们提出了一系列公开可用的技术图表，说明了微生物真核生物（或“原生生物”）的各种复杂的身体计划，以及一棵插图树，以显示它们所包含的巨大多样性以及它们之间的关系到更熟悉的宏观动物、真菌和植物。关于微生物世界的教学和交流迫切需要此类工具，这是一个迫切需要改进的重要问题。