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 have been looking vampires — microscopic ones, at the very least. 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 variety, the researchers took water samples from ponds and wetlands close to Cologne.
Beneath the microscope, one water-filled petri dish was teeming with spherical, reddish, motionless blobs — what vampyrellids appear to be after feeding. However close by algae lacked telltale feeding holes.
Time-lapse images confirmed the amoebas have 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. “In fact, the query turns into, properly, 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.
“Once you see related pellet-casting in loads of different organisms, they’ve a number of cells that fulfill a number of features. And this can be a single cell doing the sort of mechanistic motion,” Suthaus says. “It tells us concerning the ingenuity of evolution.”
