APROCEAN

tardibabe

I try as hard as possible not to damage or kill the organisms I find and observe but sometimes some huge single cells slip through my fingers 😩 Altough I still find beauty in death and I know other microbes will feast on this beauty! This clip was sped up 7 times ☺️

I find so many of these smol beans with beautiful coloured vacuoles, they’re called Ophryoglena and are part of the the Oligohymenophorea class, just like Paramecia and Tetrahymena. The vacuoles are filled with food and their colour usually depends of which colour the food has!

Ophryoglena are found in freshwater often scavenging on dead aquatic invertebrates like Copepods, Daphnias, insect larvae and various worms. They eat by rubbing their mouth in their food while turning around, as you can see in the video 😂 Some species are also parasites of insects, fishes and mussels, especially zebra mussels, and can be found in great numbers within their digestive gland.

Ophryoglena has a complex life cycle with a feeding stage called trophont which have a pointy anterior end, then it encysts as a mouthless tomont , which produces theronts, the morphologically elongated stage which seeks out new preys to feed on! The individual from this clip seems in its tomont stage since the mouth isn’t there anymore but the cell is (was) still moving 😅

Epic soundtrack is a courtesy of @ainsworththemusician 💫

Video taken with my iPhone mounted on a BA310E Motic microscope with an @ilabcam adapter 🔬

Reference:

Lynn, D. (2008). The ciliated protozoa: characterization, classification, and guide to the literature. Springer Science & Business Media.