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Ciliates from the family Trachelocercidae (Karyorelictea) are commonly known as swan-necked ciliates. They are only found between the sand grains in marine sediment, and so they are rarely seen by casual observers. Here are two swan-neck ciliates swimming about while in conjugation.
Collected from Twin Cayes, Belize. Filmed on 2015-07-04.
[taxonomy:family=Trachelocercidae]
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Ciliates from the family Trachelocercidae (Karyorelictea) are commonly known as swan-necked ciliates. They are only found between the sand grains in marine sediment, and so they are rarely seen by casual observers. Here are two swan-neck ciliates swimming about while in conjugation.
Collected from Twin Cayes, Belize. Filmed on 2015-07-04.
[taxonomy:family=Trachelocercidae]
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Trachelocercid ciliates, commonly known as "swan-necked ciliates", live in marine sediment. This video shows how they make tentative movements with their knob-shaped head, and how they can contract quite quickly from time to time.
[taxonomy:family=Trachelocercidae]
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Trachelocercid ciliates, commonly known as "swan-necked ciliates", live in marine sediment. This video shows how they make tentative movements with their knob-shaped head, and how they can contract quite quickly from time to time. Instead of swimming only with the head pointing forward, as one might expect it to, it sometimes switches direction and glides along with the "head" trailing in the back!
At one point it stops to pick around in a clump of debris. Is it picking up food particles through its "mouth" at the end of the head, or is it simply trying to find a way through the debris?
Collected from marine sediment on the coast of Denmark. Thanks to the Marine Biological Section of the University of Copenhagen for hosting our visit.
[taxonomy:family=Trachelocercidae]
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[taxonomy:binomial=Licnophora macfarlandi]
Ciliates among debris and microinvertebrates from Eel Pond, Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Summer 2009
The cell has a 'head' with active cilia used for feeding, connected via a stalk to a sucker-like base, which it uses to adhere to substrate. The base is capable of rotating and reorienting the cell.
Imaging: Phase contrast
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Ciliate from the family Folliculinidae, from a surface colonization experiment deployed at the margin of mangrove forest at Twin Cayes, Belize. The "bunny ears" are known as peristomal wings, and they carry part of the oral ciliature involved in feeding.
[taxonomy:family=Folliculinidae]
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Kentrophoros sp. H from Elba, Italy. Imaging and 3D reconstruction by Thomas Schwaha (University of Vienna).
All Kentrophoros ciliates have ectosymbiotic, sulfur-oxidizing bacteria. These bacteria form a dense coat on one side of the ciliate cell. In this particular species, the symbiont-bearing side is heavily folded into pouch-like structures, visible in the animated section series as the brighter regions. In the 3D surface model, the yellow region is the ciliate cell body, the blue region is the volume occupied by the bacteria, and in red are the three nuclei of the ciliate cell.
[taxonomy:genus=Kentrophoros]
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Kentrophoros is a ciliate with symbiotic bacteria, which it uses as a food source.
Find out more about our research at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology:
http://www.mpi-bremen.de/Page7717.html#Section25339
[taxonomy:phylum=Ciliophora]
[taxonomy:genus=Kentrophoros]