You are one of the biggest toughest lifeforms around at the moment. But sometimes, you’re still just food. You’re just a little single cell bag of takeaway proteins to an even bigger bikont.

It’s getting tougher out there…maybe you need to toughen up? You can get a thicker “skin” which is called a cortex, that would make it harder for other bikonts to eat you, and also enable you to some more extreme chemistry.

On the other hand, if you keep your thinner skin, you’ll have energy to spare to make more copies of yourself. What are you going to do?