Micro-world Perception: What does a microbe perceive as it's being, say, sloshed in a glass of water? I've wondered how micro-organisms perceive the larger world, it's forces and the 
consequences the relatively massive forces have on such tiny objects.
Let's say E coli (0.5 micro meters width, 2 micro-meters length) in a pure stream of water, moving with an acceleration of 2 m/s^2.
I've used a micro-organism in this question solely to validate perception. From a biological viewpoint, the microbe may not percieve the forces, nevertheless, what are the effects on the body.
I'm interested in the effects on a small scale on any micro-object.
 A: As pointed out by PM 2Ring, as animals get smaller, the effects of the viscosity of the water become greater. A human pushes his or her way through the water; a goldfish wiggles their way through the water, and an animal the size of a water flea (1/10th of an inch, or less) crawls through the water as if it were pancake syrup (to us). A big paramecium (1/100th of an inch or less) engages the water with its cilia and drags itself through it. 
To a bacterium, water becomes a matrix in which it is embedded and although there are bacteria with single whip-like cilia for propulsion, their mobility is limited. When the water/matrix is accelerated, they are carried along with it unless the force causing the acceleration is (by our standards) really big- hundreds to thousands of G's. In this case, they sink through the water in the opposite direction of the G force and can also get sheared open and destroyed when the force varies strongly with position on a scale length of order ~several bacterium lengths or less. 
