Here is a filose(=”thin-footed) amoeba from nearby decaying leaf litter. Most likely a species of Lecythium, but these amoebae are so poorly studied it’s hard to establish what’s what (nor has there been hardly any molecular work done to figure out where they fit, but probably somewhere in Cercozoa (in supergroup Rhizaria), near filose scale-plated [...]

Last post of 2012! Hope it was a good year for you all, and that the next will be even better — Happy New Year! Some protists sitting in champagne glasses might be relevant to our interests: Bicosoecids are non-photosynthetic relatives of brown algae. Usually nestled in a delicate lorica (but sometimes devoid of one), [...]

I’m out of town right now with stunningly crappy internet, but will try to redeem myself a bit with some scheduled posts. Mostly pictures (uploaded before crappy internet). We’ll have plenty of time to do some hardcore SCIENCE in the new year! =) For this Friday, let’s do mushrooms. I’ve collected a few photos of [...]

Eerily empty exoskeletal remnants of a rotifer, a few bacteria and what might be a cyst of some parasite — perhaps the one who led this rotifer to meet its fate. (it could also have died of old age and been devoured posthumously, of course) From a pocosin (swamp) in North Carolina.

A golden pennate diatom and a green euglenid, Phacus sp., industriously photosynthesising before the slide dries out. Perhaps unexpectedly for its appearance, the diatom can actually move, by secreting mucus to glide on through the raphe (a slit), and often quickly enough to screw up your photography. Luckily, this one was paused at that moment. [...]

While I work on another post, here’s a nucleus of an amoeba to look at. Some amoebae tend to have large and fairly obvious nuclei, and, if the cell is thin enough, you can make out some nuclear ultrastructure! This specimen is flattened, so what we have here is not a completely natural representation of [...]

You may be shocked to know that, on a rare occasion, yours truly does look at things that are not protists. Sometimes even finding them interesting. And often taking far too many photos. So I have this stash of photos that might even be interesting, but completely irrelevant to anything I do — as most [...]

The previous Mystery Micrograph was of the surface of Blepharisma, a characteristically pink ciliate. You can see rows of the pigment granules responsible for the unusual colour. Not clearly visible throughout most of the image (only on the top side) are rows of cilia that are interspersed between the pigment granule rows (about every 5-7 [...]

Microgromia is a tiny amoeba with an organic shell who, much like a spider, lays down a sizeable spread of thread-like pseudopods (filopodia) lines with sticky extrusomes, waiting for the unfortunate bacterium or eukaryotic flagellate to stroll by. Unlike a spider, Microgromia does not need to wander off to apprehend trapped prey — its ‘web’ [...]

Some amoebae build elaborate houses for themselves to live in. (top and side view of an Arcellinid) Some build their houses out of siliceous (glass) scales and peek out of them with thread-like pseudopods called filopodia. (optical sections of a Euglypha cristata from a soil sample) Some amoebae can be naked. (Saccamoeba(?) Note the wrinkly-bulby [...]