There’s a natural pond down the road, where I collect samples. I always go to the same spot, the edge of a shallow basin in the “littoral zone”, where the pond shades into the shore. I follow the same routine each time: I dip a turkey baster into the soft muck–organic sediments enriched with duckshit…
An elusive giant has risen from the muck at the bottom of a Florida canal. It is the ciliate Loxodes rex, a large and shapely thing once thought to be endemic to equatorial Africa. Hunter Hines, a Ph.D. student affiliated with the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution, has published the first record of the species on…
In my previous post on the lorica-dwelling scuticociliate Calyptotricha pleuronemoides, I mentioned that only two substantial articles have been written about the species since its discovery (apart from brief descriptions in various places). Until yesterday, I’d been unable to find the second article, which appeared in the German microscopy journal Mikrokosmos in 1999. Luckily, one…
A few years ago, I looked in a sample of water from a bog lake, and saw something like a hyperactive avocado shifting around inside in a tiny kerosene lamp: The architect of that pretty dwelling is the ciliate Calyptotricha pleuronemoides. The species and genus were discovered in 1882, in samples from a pond near…
As I might have mentioned already, my favorite protists are the shaggy, shapely, fast-moving ciliates. They have a lot to offer the idle protist-ogler. As a group, they include some of the largest and most ridiculous-looking microbes in the pond. Many are easy to identify without expensive equipment or special techniques. Some, like the noodle-necked…
Early last year, the mayor of Salzburg proudly announced the creation of a new conservation zone around this “globally unique ‘natural monument’”: The newly protected feature is not that rocky bluff, Festungsberg hill, or the 11th-century fortress that sits on top of it. It is the long, narrow puddle in the foreground. This is Krauthügel…
