Hi. I'm trying to understand what I was watching in a marine sample of algae. Here is a video showing a strand of algae. I noticed movement, similar to what I would see if watching an amoeba. There are 3 clips in the video. First is a wide angle time lapse playing back at 8x speed. You can see movement of material down to the left. The moving material is held inside its own membrane. When it reaches an obstacle, it retracts, and then you can also see it ejecting some material. The second and third clips are real time, and give a better look at the material being ejected. It appears that there is some type of pore, similar in appearance to a puckered sphincter, that is squeezing out the material.
https://youtu.be/gbB9VxxpYiw
Does anyone know what this is? Is it behavior common to algae? Or could it be some type of organism that was living inside this algae strand?
I'm also sharing a few photos showing what the algae in the sample looks like, in case IDing the algae might help understand the video.
- algae stalks with vorticella b sm.jpg (187.88 KiB) Viewed 902 times
- marine alga wide view stack b sm.jpg (210.98 KiB) Viewed 902 times
- algae strand and wedge diatom stack b sm.jpg (156.42 KiB) Viewed 902 times