A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
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dinoflagellate
A dinoflagellate is a single-celled organism that swims using two whip-like tails set at right angles to each other, one wrapped in a groove around its middle and one trailing behind, so that it moves forward while spinning. Many are armored in interlocking plates of cellulose. Some photosynthesize, some hunt, some do both, and a great many produce light when the water around them is disturbed.
Etymology
The first half is a Greek word for whirling, for the spinning motion, and the second is the Latin for a small whip, which is the standard biological term for a tail of this kind. The whirling is the observation that came first, and the naming happened while people were watching the things swim under a lens.
Notes
Bioluminescent dinoflagellates are what light a boat wake, a footprint on wet sand, or a hand pulled through the water at night, and a handful of bays hold them in permanent concentrations. The light is a burglar alarm: A flash startles whatever is eating the grazer, or draws something larger to it. Dinoflagellates also live inside coral tissue and supply most of what a reef eats.