Interesting mode of feeding in an amoeba

[tlansing]

I saw a very interesting mode of feeding in an unidentified amoeba recently. When I came upon this amoeba, it had an unfortunate ciliate attached to it. The amoeba seemed to be extracting cytoplasm from the ciliate by suction; I don't know any other way to describe it. In the sequence of photos below, you can see the cytoplasm of the ciliate being "pulled" into a food vacuole and pinched off. However, once this is completed, the amoeba doesn't let go of the ciliate but begins to generate a new food vacuole. The movie shows this and follows the last photo in the sequence.

Photos and video were taken with a Canon 1300D camera attached to a Zeiss Photomicroscope III. Objective is a 40x planachromat, optovar at 1.25x, DIC. The photos were taken using flash.

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[ImperatorRex]

Interesting observation!

[Bruce Taylor]

Fascinating!

[Sure Squintsalot]

Spit-swapping

Gross. And YOU were watching.

Give them some privacy.

[tlansing]

Sure Squintsalot: I'm not sure that ciliate would see it that way!

[Javier]

Hi Tim,

That is a very interesting scene you got. Thanks for sharing.

I don't know much about amoebas, but I think Vampirella acts more like a suctorian on algae:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFCQoObWtvQ