Earlier today I felt like procrastinating a little and posted a protistology IAmA thread on Reddit (basically threads where the opening poster answers questions, titles formatted like this: I Am A XYZ, Ask Me Anything). I expected a couple questions before the thread disappears forever into the obscurity of the great internet graveyard. Shockingly enough, apparently people actually care about science or something because I was typing away non-stop at a blizzard of questions for a few hours, until now. It was quite inspiring to see the type of questions people can come up with (even the basic badly-worded ones show that at least people care enough to ask), and learned a few things along the way too. Anyway, I'll come back to answer more stuff tomorrow, but here's the thread for the curious. Feel free to stop by and ask stuff! I find that sometimes the blog comment area can be a bit intimidating if you feel you have a dumb question, so you don't ask anything. Reddit dilutes that effect, and is quite a bit more anonymous.
And now to randomly show off a random Haptorian ciliate – meet Litonotus, a vicious predator armed with terrifying toxicysts, which you can see as long narrow things in its cytoplasm. Also note the two prominent macronuclei visible as clear-ish round areas in the cell. Litonotus is cool and all, but the bastard preys on creatures like Euplotes, which are kind of adorable (imagine Litonotus eats kittens...that's how bad it is). Nature is red in tooth cytostome and claw cilium indeed...
So I caved and got me a Youtube account, partly inspired by a comment in the previous post. Accumulated half a metric shit ton of random protist videos by now, and compressing them for Bloggers crappy video sharing system would take way too much time, and I barely have the time to grab stills and post them here. So finally there's a suitable outlet for my raw video data – maybe someday when I'm not going completely insane and falling behind on a million things I didn't really have time for in the first place, I may put together a properly edited video. But don't hold your breath for it...
We have some pretty awesome microscopy and video equipment in the lab, and I'm lucky to have a PI nice enough not to mind some of us using it to fuck around with random samples in the middle of the night. I hope it may help bring the microbial world a little closer to you, and add a whole new dimension of time to our protists.
Let's start off with some euglenid metaboly, since it's quite hard to talk about without seeing it. Actually, the true reason is that it's about the first thing my cursor landed on when I opened my pile of videos for file conversion. But just as we ascribe purpose to evolutionary happenings, we can likewise ascribe purpose to my selection here ;-)
Since I'm lazy and behind on about a million things (to the point where I must mention it twice), just gonna copy the short description I wrote for this bug on the YouTube page. Enjoy!
This is a heterotrophic euglenid, perhaps a Peranema sp., exhibiting metaboly in all its splendour. The cell might be slightly squashed or otherwise damaged, keeping the flagellate conveniently in one place. The clear vesicle near the base of the flagellum that grows and shrinks is the contractile vacuole, the flagellate's analogue of the animal secretory system. At the tail end are refractile starch granules used to store energy.
Metaboly is a form of cell movement that is most famously exemplified by ciliates, but also known in some other flagellates. It appears to be caused by the specific arrangement of microtubule (cell skeleton) bundles at the cell periphery, and greatly enhanced by the 'armour plates' of the euglenid surface, which is lined with long pellicle strips going from the flagellar insertion all the way to the tip of the 'tail' -- as the cell twists about, the strips slide against each other and result in this movement. Euglenids with fused pellicle strips, like Phacus, are incapable of metaboly. The function of this movement is unknown, and there may not be any in particular.
The hairy thing next to the euglenid is a badly mangled ciliate.
Freshwater, Apr 2011, Vancouver
And please let me know if you have any requests, comments or suggestions for these videos. I'm new to the world of moving pictures (instead I see videos as image sequences, like any proper cell biologist ought to...), so I'm in an even greater state than usual in not knowing what the hell I'm doing.
To compensate for crappy blogging as of late (and the delays in the Great Review of Heterolobosea aka 'cruel and unusual punishment'), here's some random parabasalian swimming around: (Trichonympha methinks)
And a Spirotrichonympha?
Since I'm too lazy to ID this thing for sure at the moment, it would be great if some resident extreme excavate experts (XXX for short...?) could perhaps blurt it out. You know who you are. Also, are those Monocercomonoides, the little things swimming around?
I lack video editing software, so apologies for random background noise. Got plenty more clips of Saccinobaculus, by the way. Should show up when I have time to re-blog about that wonderful organism (I think it deserves a much better post...) For now, enjoy the suspense =P (and go hang out at the Mystery Micrograph - should be more interesting now that we've established it's a case of a multicellular parasite of a unicellular organism. Hint: As far as I know, there's only one documented case of that. )
