Sunday(?) Protist - Eucomonympha

Internet broken at home, and also incredibly busy: lots of research stuff, final this Friday, another summer course just started, and unofficially auditing a microscopy course that's happening right now. Basically, back to chaos as usual.

So out of laziness, a cute Eucomonympha to oogle at:

(Carpenter & Keeling 2007 J Euk Microbiol)

Cockroach gut endosymbiont, eats wood, anaerobe. Scale bars 20um, so this thing is quite humongous. Surface consists of multitudes of flagella interspersed with spirochaete ectosymbionts, and some other bacteria. I'd love to do cell biology on this thing, but that creator made those things anaerobic to inconvenience our attempts to deny his existence. What a sly bastard!

Ok, they're making me ditch protists for the next little while... the cruelty! =(

There's also a recently accepted (but still in advance publication) paper full of absolutely drool-worthy Trichonympha SEMs by the same guys... will save for later.