A microbial predator that stalks the waters of the German countryside envelopes its victims and leaves their empty husks behind. The predator — a newfound amoeba dubbed Strigomyxa ruptor — feeds like no different protist, researchers report within the August Ecology and Evolution.
Protozoologists Andreas Suthaus and Sebastian Hess of the College of Cologne in Germany had been searching vampires — microscopic ones, no less than. Vampyrellid amoebas eat holes within the cell partitions of algae and slurp up the insides (SN: 11/2/15). Trying to perceive the protists’ organic range, the researchers took water samples from ponds and wetlands close to Cologne.
Underneath the microscope, one water-filled petri dish was teeming with spherical, reddish, motionless blobs — what vampyrellids seem like after feeding. However close by algae lacked telltale feeding holes.
Time-lapse images confirmed the amoebas had been vampyrellids. However they didn’t feed like different microscopic vampires. The unicellular blobs engulfed and cut up aside Closterium algae cells, sucking out the insides and tossing the remainder.
“We simply couldn’t consider it at first,” Suthaus says. “After all, the query turns into, nicely, how precisely do [the amoebas] do it?”
Feeding experiments revealed that S. ruptor retains engulfed algae in a particular compartment. Enzymes on this chamber seem to dissolve one facet of the prey’s cell wall. The opposite facet is hooked up to the chamber wall. Because the compartment expands, the algae cell swings open like a shelled pistachio. S. ruptor then reaches into itself to scoop up its meal, bundling up and spitting out the empty cell wall.
The odd vampyrellids belong to a beforehand undescribed genus and species, a genetic evaluation suggests. The genus identify Strigomyxa, which derives from the traditional Greek phrases for owl and mucus or slime, is a nod to the microbe’s owllike regurgitation conduct.
“While you see comparable pellet-casting in lots of different organisms, they’ve a number of cells that fulfill a number of capabilities. And this can be a single cell doing one of these mechanistic motion,” Suthaus says. “It tells us concerning the ingenuity of evolution.”
