Aprocean-1

 tardibabe

This ciliate protozoan is from the Trachelius genus and reminds me of the moon, full of craters of various sizes 🌙

These crater structures are actually called contractile vacuoles and their role is to regulate the osmotic pressure inside the cell. Imagine you’re on a boat with holes in it and you tried to keep the water out by filling buckets! That’s pretty much the role of those contractile vacuoles, they’re the buckets of this tiny Trachelius ship 😄

Trachelius is a predator and carnivorous little boi and loves to feed on Peritrich ciliates like Vorticella but also likes a good Rotifer or even some algae! If you’ve seen my other videos of Dileptus, you may have noticed that Trachelius has the same elephant trunk structure near its mouth. This part of the cell is called the proboscis and is used to sense the environment and potential preys.

It has been observed before that when Trachelius is trapped under the cover slip (the small piece of glass we put on top of the sample) it tends to eject some body parts or cellular content. When I started following Trachelius around, it lost its proboscis and got me really confused with what this little buddy could be 😂 at last, I found others like him in the sample and was able to identify him 😇

That’s all for today folks!! 💜💜

Soundtrack magic was brought to you by the extraordinary @arithmetikmusiq thmetikmusiq ✨

Video taken with my iPhone mounted on my BA310E Motic microscope with an @ilabcam adapter 🔬 @moticamericas

References:
Fenchel, T. (2013). Ecology of Protozoa: The biology of free-living phagotropic protists. Springer-Verlag.

Foissner, W., & Berger, H. (1996). A user‐friendly guide to the ciliates (Protozoa, Ciliophora) commonly used by hydrobiologists as bioindicators in rivers, lakes, and waste waters, with notes on their ecology. Freshwater biology, 35(2), 375-482.

Nisbet, B. (2012). Nutrition and feeding strategies in protozoa. Springer Science & Business Media.

Patterson, D. J., & Hedley, S. (1996). Freeliving Freshwater Protozoa. CRC Press.