#cilliates

[niqvassieart]

Meeting a water bear. 🌱

Basically wishing I could make myself tiny and get lost in some moss. So much beauty in little drops of water.

[zooming-glass]

This is a Paramecium

It's a single-celled organism known as a Cilliate, due to the cillia covering its membrane by which it moves

They are predatory organisms, feeding on other protists and bacteria. They don't engulf their prey like an amoeba or anything; they just have a mouth (called a cytostome) that leads into a food vacuole, which is basically a stomach

This stomach fills with acid and enzymes just like an animal stomach. The only real distinction being that when the stomach on the mouth is full it closes off and starts floating about their cytoplasm, with a new food vacuole growing at the mouth

But what happens when the food in the stomach is digested? Well they just take a poop out of their anus

Which is just a thing that these protists have

[andmaybegayer]

Rotifer filter feeding in a sample from the pond. It's always weird to see something so small and so obviously alive, you can see the cillia moving water around and the tail pulsing. This is at 400×

Really need to convert this thing to DC you can see the AC flicker so bad.

also I'm pretty sure that's a Daphnia

[merismo]

My best attempt at filming an Aspidisca. Pretty tricky since they like to crawl in and out of focus! They use modified cilia called cirri to crawl around the bottom of ponds and lakes, munching up bacteria and detritus.