Why are cells small?

Rather large gas tank: Collected and stored sediment samples were found to have surviving T. namibiensis cells after over two years. The cells had no access to any added sulfide or nitrate during this time. In the surviving cells, there was a notable size decrease. To survive without growing the cells depended on the nutrient stores of the central vacuoles.

I had to go look this up, as I had heard the egg thing my whole life and just accepted it. It turns out the oocyte is the single cell inside the egg, which for birds is significantly larger than a typical cell. So in that respect, the cell in a bird egg is very large. However, compared to the egg itself, it's tiny. The yolk and whites in the egg are all to provide nutrients as it grows, if fertilized.

This reminds me also of this paper: https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.1115585109 "The allocation of all metabolic resources to maintenance purposes limits the size of the smallest prokaryotes and largest unicellular eukaryotes, whereas an inability to meet the ever-increasing biosynthesis rates limits the largest prokaryotes and smallest unicellular eukaryotes. Metabolic constraints for larger eukaryotes are relieved by alternative reproductive strategies and multicellularity."

I also got curious, this is the most personal comment I could find https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44498083 Funny, but might as well be generic, trained from reddit comments. What a time we live in.