Sounds like advanced symbiosis. I wonder if the movement is across a gradient or whether the super organism has a control unit that makes decisions. Are we a result of similar microorganisms?
Many of the stages required to imagine how life went from solo and unicellular, to cooperative unicellular, to specialized unicellular verging on multicellular, to full-specialization unable to survive independently as a single cell, exists in some species or other today.
E.g. Dictyostelium is an amoeba. (Amoebas are not bacteria; they're eukaryotes like animals or fungi -- sexual reproduction and an encased nucleus.) Individual cells can survive independently, hunting for much smaller bacteria and nutrients. But in the presence of many other cells of its species, chemical communication occurs to trigger and guide cell differentiation. Some at the exterior of the cluster change into a protective shell, like skin, or a macro cell-wall. Others specialize into ion transfer between the interior and exterior environment. Some are even triggered to kill themselves during the reproductive phase, providing nutrients to their kin.
It's on the line between multicellular, and not. Parts can float off and re-join. I think something like that was the intermediate stage in the evolution of multicellular life like animals, but there's many other competing hypotheses and none seem to be universally accepted.
I think the answer to your question is probably "yes." I listened to an interesting show on PBS radio 30 Oct. about what happened 2Byo that jump-started evolution. I can't find the show online, which explained in depth, but this short and patronizing video[1] covers the gist of it.
Also, for fun: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-20080-3
Get "The computational beauty of nature", too. And its repo.
I'm no biologist, but from what I've read: Probably not. A really important fact about multicellular life is that each cell is genetically identical to any other cell in the organism. Otherwise, different cells will start competing with one another, until the relationship falls apart. In nature, symbiosis only works because each cell has an independent means of reproduction, and that always puts a limit to how close the cooperation can be (nothing close to forming multicellular life).
Mitochondria is its own organism, has its own DNA that is separate and distinct from nuclear DNA. It has been very successful through very close cooperation.[0]
such as chloroplasts.
> In the last 190 million years, the number of genes on the Y has plummeted from more than 1,000 to roughly 50, a loss of more than 95 percent.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-incredible-shrinking-sex-...
How much of this has happened in the recent human history? Are we becoming less “manly”?
Not necessarily. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimera_%28genetics%29#Humans
Our cells DNA also drift over time due to localized mutations. What matters is that they should keep obeying all the chemical signalling.
> Otherwise, different cells will start competing with one another, until the relationship falls apart.
When that happens in complex multicellular organisms, it's usually called "cancer".