Amoeba
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40 free Amoeba trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
An amoeba looks like the simplest thing alive: one cell, no fixed outline, no brain. Yet amoebas hunt, build, cooperate and survive droughts, and a few are among the most feared microbes on Earth. This quiz turns the best amoeba fun facts into questions. It covers how an amoeba moves and feeds, where the name came from, the record-breaking giants, the species that make people ill, and the surprising places the word turns up outside biology. It is pitched for curious kids, biology students and anyone who remembers peering down a school microscope. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you finish knowing more than when you started.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The brain-eating amoeba Naegleria fowleri infects people only when water enters through which part of the body?
Nose
The nose is the only way in: the amoeba follows the smell nerves up to the brain, while swallowing the same water is harmless. Infections are extremely rare but almost always fatal.
Q 02Which programming language was first developed for Amoeba, an operating system built at a university in Amsterdam?
Python
Python was written by Guido van Rossum, who wanted a scripting language that could talk to Amoeba. The system made a whole network of computers behave like a single machine.
Q 03A German naturalist who drew the first known amoeba in 1755 named it after which shape-shifting Greek sea god?
Proteus
Proteus could take any form to slip away from those who caught him, so the ever-shifting pond creature became 'the little Proteus'. The same god gave English the word protean.
Q 04Which of the human body's defenders crawl like an amoeba to chase down and engulf invading germs?
White blood cells
White blood cells pursue bacteria and wrap around them, just as a pond amoeba takes its prey. Biologists even call their crawling style amoeboid movement.
Q 05Which 1958 horror film gave Steve McQueen his first leading role, battling an amoeba-like alien in Pennsylvania?
The Blob
The Blob stars a carnivorous jelly that arrives inside a meteorite and swells with every victim it absorbs. McQueen was paid just $3,000 for the part.
Q 06Starving Dictyostelium amoebas gather by the thousand into one crawling body nicknamed after which garden creature?
Slug
A slug of up to 100,000 cells, only 2 to 4 mm long, creeps toward light and warmth as if it were a single animal. Loners that team up this way are known as social amoebas.
Q 07An amoeba once named Amoeba dubia is reported to carry about 200 times as much of what as a human cell?
DNA
DNA in this pond amoeba was measured at 670 billion base pairs, against about 3 billion in a human genome. Researchers urge caution, because the figure predates modern methods.
Q 08Acanthamoeba, an amoeba found in soil and tap water, causes a painful eye infection mostly among people who wear what?
Contact lenses
Contact lenses rinsed in tap water or worn while swimming can trap the amoeba against the eye. Ordinary multipurpose lens solutions do little to kill it.
Q 09Found inside an amoeba in 1992, which kind of microbe was so large that scientists first mistook it for a bacterium?
Virus
A virus, later named Mimivirus for 'mimicking microbe', was hiding in an amoeba collected in Bradford, England. Only in 2003 did researchers work out what it really was.
Q 10A freshwater amoeba must keep pumping out water with its contractile vacuole, or its single cell would do what?
Burst
It would burst, because water seeps into the saltier cell by osmosis without pause. Marine amoebas usually lack the pump, since seawater matches their insides.
Q 11The name amoeba, first coined as Amiba by a French naturalist in 1822, comes from a Greek word meaning what?
Change
Change is the sense of the Greek amoibe, a nod to a body that never holds one outline for long. Bory de Saint-Vincent picked the name, and a German naturalist later respelled it Amoeba.
Q 12The name of the pseudopods an amoeba uses to crawl and to seize food translates into English as what?
False feet
False feet is the literal meaning: each pseudopod is a temporary bulge that flows forward and later melts back into the body. An amoeba can push out several at once.
Q 13Carl Linnaeus filed the first described amoeba under which name, now a genus of giant amoebas?
Chaos
Q 21Which process, whose name means 'cell eating', does an amoeba use to wrap around and swallow prey whole?
Phagocytosis
Phagocytosis ends with the victim sealed in a pocket inside the amoeba, where it is slowly digested. A big pond amoeba can even swallow rotifers, which are tiny many-celled animals.
Q 22Gromia sphaerica, a giant single-celled amoeba found off Oman and the Bahamas, is said to resemble which fruit?
Grape
A grape is the usual comparison, right down to the soft skin. As it creeps through mud, Gromia leaves trails like fossil tracks 1.8 billion years old that were once credited to early animals.
Q 23Which bacteria, behind a pneumonia first seen at a 1976 veterans' convention in Philadelphia, multiply inside amoebas?
Legionella
Chaos was the name Linnaeus gave the shapeless creature. The genus now holds giant amoebas that reach 5 mm long, big enough to spot without a microscope.
Q 14The Amoeba Boys, a trio of dimwitted would-be villains, appear in which Cartoon Network series?
The Powerpuff Girls
The Powerpuff Girls seldom need to fight them: the three mutant amoebas, who speak with Brooklyn accents, long to be respected criminals but are too incompetent to manage it.
Q 15Entamoeba histolytica, an amoeba spread by contaminated food and water, causes which disease of the gut?
Dysentery
Dysentery of the amoebic kind strikes when the parasite attacks the lining of the bowel. Tens of millions of people carry it, though many never feel ill.
Q 16Being neither animal, plant nor fungus, an amoeba belongs to which catch-all group of mostly single-celled life?
Protists
Protists are simply the complex-celled organisms left over once animals, plants and fungi are set aside. That makes the group a grab bag of unrelated branches, not one family.
Q 17Unlike plants and fungi, an amoeba can freely reshape itself because it lacks which stiff outer layer?
Cell wall
A cell wall would lock the amoeba into one outline, as it does every cell of an oak or a mushroom. With only a flexible membrane around it, the amoeba can flow in any direction.
Q 18Syringammina fragilissima, an amoeba-like single cell that grows up to 20 centimetres across, lives in which habitat?
Deep ocean floor
The deep ocean floor is home to this giant, first dredged up off Scotland in 1882. Its one cell spreads through hundreds of branching, sediment-crusted tubes that crumble at a touch.
Q 19With no partner needed, a common pond amoeba reproduces by which simple method?
Splitting in two
Splitting in two, known as binary fission, yields a pair of identical amoebas. If one is cut apart by force, usually only the piece holding the nucleus survives.
Q 20When a pond dries out, an amoeba can survive by rolling into a ball inside a protective coat called what?
Cyst
A cyst is the amoeba's emergency shelter: the cell sheds most of its water, seals itself in and lies dormant until conditions improve. It cannot feed or divide while shut inside.
Legionella uses amoebas as its main hosts, breeding inside them in cooling towers, showers and spas. It takes its name from the American Legion, whose members fell ill at the convention.
Q 24The first amoeba ever described in humans lives around which part of the body?
Gums
Gums are its home, in the pockets at the base of the teeth, and it can pass between people with a kiss. It turns up in 95% of people with gum disease but rarely in healthy ones.
Q 25In a 2010 study, the amoeba-like slime mould Physarum polycephalum grew a network matching which city's railways?
Tokyo
Tokyo and 36 nearby towns were marked out with oat flakes, and the brainless yellow slime mould joined them with feeding tubes about as efficient as the real train system.
Q 26Shell-building amoebas such as the pond genus Difflugia make their portable homes by gluing together grains of what?
Sand
Sand grains, picked up and cemented into a neat case, make a Difflugia shell. When the amoeba divides, it hands its spare building material to the daughter cell.
Q 27Biologists call the clear outer layer of an amoeba by which word, also used for the ghostly substance of séances?
Ectoplasm
Ectoplasm is the clear gel just under an amoeba's skin, wrapped around a grainy inner core. In 1894 psychical researcher Charles Richet gave the same name to the stuff mediums claimed to produce.
Q 28The brain-eating amoeba Naegleria fowleri honours Malcolm Fowler, who described the first cases in which country?
Australia
Australia saw the first recognised cases in the 1960s, written up by Fowler at Adelaide Children's Hospital. The amoeba thrives in warm fresh water, from lakes to poorly chlorinated pools.
Q 29Radiolarians, amoeba-like sea drifters drawn in detail by Ernst Haeckel, build their lacy skeletons from which material?
Silica
Silica, the raw material of glass, gives radiolarians skeletons tough enough to survive as fossils from the Cambrian onwards. Geologists use them to work out the age of rocks.
Q 30Coin-shaped fossil shells of nummulites, giant amoeba-like sea creatures, fill the limestone of which ancient monuments?
The Giza pyramids
The Giza pyramids are built from limestone packed with nummulites, each the shell of a single cell. The ancient writer Strabo took the little discs for lentils dropped by the builders.