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…
Tulodens. I ran across them while skimming the Wikipedia article on Protozoa, and the name didn’t ring a bell. However, the free encyclopedia assured me that there are “an estimated 30,000 protozoan species,” so it wasn’t too surprising that I’d missed these guys. Apparently, there are at least two of them, or two kinds, and…
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…
It’s been less than half a year since Eckhard Voelcker and Steffen Clauß launched their enchanting online gallery of amoeboid organisms, www.Penard.de. Already, it has emerged as one of the best places to find micrographs of amoebae and heliozoans, and the collection is continuing to grow and improve. The site features some superb light microscopy, but…
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…
