To Sally Warring, protists are an absolutely underrated type of wildlife.   “Protists are very charismatic and interesting,” says Warring, who studies these creatures at the Earlham Institute in Norwich, England. Among this richly diverse group of mostly single-celled eukaryotes (creatures whose DNA is packed in a nucleus), some are hunters and others prey. Some live in colonies, others alone. Some even have mating rituals or build themselves tiny structures to live in.   Here, Sally Warring catches microbes in New York City’s Ridgewood Reservoir using a plankton net. Sabrina Imbler “There’s all this stuff going on that we usually associate with more complex animals,” Warring says. “It’s just not as well-studied because it’s harder to study.”  Warring’s research investigates the genetic blueprints, or genomes, of protists. “From the genomes, we can get information about what these organisms are and how they live — what they need to eat … if they secrete things into the environment, that kind of information,” Warring says. That could help explore more than the largely uncharted biodiversity of protists. It could …