Flagellates do not move via "flagellation"

[jwsmith]

Since only 1973, it has been scientifically known that microbial organisms called "FLAGELLATES"......do not move by "flagellating" their tail back-and-forth, but rather, through an utterly non-intuitive and very complex motion of ROTATING a tail that rather than being flexible and straight, is rigid and helical.

This is/was a fundamental reversal of common observational (and Scientific) understanding."

The subject, authority for, and the "ion-channel" basis, of this mode of motion is addressed in:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1303206/

Additional information (including visualization-diagrams) can be obtained via a GOOGLE "search-line"
"flagellate"+"rotary motion" (the quotations and "+" sign are necessary)

Although I have been "on board" with this fact for a long time....
I still find it............u t t e r l y........amazing.

[actinophrys]

This motion applies to bacterial flagella. However the flagella you find in flagellate protozoans and other eukaryotes are very different; they sometimes do move by whipping back and forth, or make coordinated strokes like in Chlamydomonas, undergo complex looping like in Euglena, glide along the substrate like in Cercomonas, oscillate in place around the cell like in Peridinium, and so on. Instead of a rotary base, these have a much more complex structure involving several microtubules that slide against each other to create different types of motion.

[Dennis]

Gonium, a colonial algae has a pair of flagella on each of the outer cells waving around.

-Dennis