Trachelophyllum??

[btschumy]

Can anyone ID this? Is it Trachelophyllum?

[Bruce Taylor]

It is almost certainly a trachelophyllid, and Trachelophyllum would be the traditional identification. Since researchers began looking closely at the mucilaginous layer that surrounds these organisms (difficult to see in the light microscope, but visible in your image), genera within the group have been differentiated by close investigation of their rather beautiful and intricate epicortical scales (which requires a scanning electron microscope). To add to the difficulty, the similar genus Ileonema (technically not a trachelophyllid, but closely related) can lose or retract its distinctive "flagellar process" and look remarkably like Trachelophyllum. So, if you want to be really careful, you'd probably just call this guy a member of the suborder Trachelophyllina.

The epicortical scales look like a layer of slime around the outside of the cell:



In SEM, the "slime" turns out to be made of rather extraordinary structures:



Diagram from Foissner, Wilhelm, Sabine Agatha, and Helmut Berger. Soil ciliates (Protozoa, Ciliophora) from Namibia. Ed. Biologiezentrum des Oberösterreichischen Landesmuseums. Vol. 1459. Biologiezentrum der Oberösterreichischen Landesmuseums, 2002.

[JimT]

Bill, that is a fantastic image. Tell us your technique.

Bruce, you are the "Go to guy" for protest ID's. How do you know all this stuff?

JimT

[btschumy]

Bruce,

Thanks for the probable confirmation of Trachelophyllum. I will echo JimT's appreciation of your knowledge and willingness to help.

JimT,

This was taken using oblique lighting, created by rotating my phase contrast condenser ring slightly out of skew. Just happened to get a shot where the whole body was pretty much in the same plane. I then adjusted the white balance during processing to give it a bit of a blue tone.

[Bruce Taylor]

Bruce, you are the "Go to guy" for protest ID's. How do you know all this stuff?

Thanks, but the "go-to guys" are the ones who wrote the original books and articles. I'm interested in ciliates, mostly, and try not to say much about other critters, because I don't keep up with the literature (though I chip in occasionally with the easy stuff).

Ciliatology is a small field, and ciliate systematics is smaller still, so it's not that hard to collect the important materials. When it comes to trachelophyllids and other haptorians, it's easier still, because in recent decades nearly everything of interest has been done by Wilhelm Foissner and his collaborators!

One of these days, I'll write a detailed piece about identifying ciliates. Identification invites close observation and "honest seeing", which can make our time at the microscope more rewarding. In the case of Bill's beautiful image, a simple taxonomic character (the mucilaginous layer by which trachelophyllids are differentiated from enchelyodontids) gives us a little window on something I find astonishing: the intricate filigree inside thousands of hard structures barely a micrometre wide--tiny bird-cages and geodesic domes!--completely surrounding a cell that is itself less than two tenths of a millimetre in length.

[zzffnn]

Nice image, Bill!

Bruce,

If you have not already done so, you should submit your review manuscript to one of those professional ciliatology (and/or protistology) journals. Is there a ciliate identification guide available, currently, as a journal article or as a book? If not, you are filling a knowledge gap!

If I may have such honor, I can help you with proofreading - I know nothing about ciliatology, though I know how to write scientifically and legally.

[exmarine]

Hi Guy's
My thoughts on this ciliate is it might be Dileptus which is a predatory ciliate.

[Bruce Taylor]

Hi, Fan. I didn't mean anything as ambitious as a ciliate "field guide" (which I'm not qualified to write, in any case). Something like that is needed, but it should probably be created on the internet, like Ferry Siemensma's amoeba site. Given that some 4,500 ciliate species have already been described (with another 35,000 or so yet to be found and named) it should probably be built around donated user collections, like the now-defunct micro*scope site. When that site went down, it deprived the internet of Bill Bourland's magnificent and taxonomically reliable collection of ~1,700 ciliates (not to mention my own collections of historic ciliate images from Schewiakoff, Ehrenberg, etc).

What I had in mind was much more modest...just an article or blog post about good identification practices, along with a list of useful texts and articles.

[Bruce Taylor]

Hi Guy's
My thoughts on this ciliate is it might be Dileptus which is a predatory ciliate.

Nope. Dileptus has its mouth at the base of its proboscis, whereas this critter has a very conspicuous oral bulge (featuring nematodesmata & toxicysts) at the apex of the cell, like the nozzle of a hose. Also, Dileptus has a scattered macronucleus with dozens or hundreds of nodules, whereas this guy has two macronucle (the dileptid Rimaleptus has an elongated proboscis and two macronuclei, but it is otherwise quite different from this little trachelophyllid).

[exmarine]

Many thanks for the information I stand by your I.D. as I now see the massive difference, Thanks.

[Seamer]

Yes, i would say this is definitely Trachelophylum.

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