In my last post, I showed some closeups of Lesquereusia spiralis, an amoeba that builds its shell out of squiggly rods held in a matrix of organic cement. The use of such self-secreted “platelets” as building units is by no means universal in lobose testate amoebae. Many build their shells from scavenged items, such as…
When conditions for life are unfavourable, some protists can cheat death by entering a cryptobiotic state. Usually, they do it by enclosing themselves within thick-walled structures called “resting cysts,” which protect vital genetic material from dehydration and extreme temperatures. Tucked away in their cysts, the cells shut down all metabolic activities and wait for the…
After studying amoeboid organisms for several decades–observing them in the field, publishing articles about them, and developing his wonderfully detailed website devoted to the little shapeshifters—Ferry Siemensma now has an amoeba he can call his own. The organism, discovered by researchers in a small greenhouse pond at the university of Cologne, is Lecythium siemensmai, a…
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…
I’ve finally identified a thing I found in my mouth nearly 25 years ago. Unfortunately, solving that old puzzle has left me with a new one concerning a protozoan normally found in the hindgut of cockroaches and termites. I ran across it in the fall of 1990. My wife was a first-year medical student and…
