While searching through a sample I came across this wonderful Vaginicola species. I was gobsmacked by it's lorica, it has a brown tinge and looks like a honey pot with ridges in the lorica, simply amazing how this little ciliate can build this wonderful home.
While looking through Alfred Kahl book on line I see on page 760 fig 142 he gives three possible species that resembles mine they are:
V. tincta
V. amphora
V. ceratophylli
Have a look at this great creature and tell me what you think.
Video 1 (150X) - https://www.flickr.com/photos/154534235 ... datetaken/
Video 2 (300X) - https://www.flickr.com/photos/154534235 ... datetaken/
Video 3 (300X) - https://www.flickr.com/photos/154534235 ... datetaken/
Video 4 (300X) - https://www.flickr.com/photos/154534235 ... datetaken/
Video 5 (600X) - https://www.flickr.com/photos/154534235 ... datetaken/
Vaginicola tincta?
Vaginicola tincta?
Leitz SM-Lux
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- Posts: 996
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Re: Vaginicola tincta?
It's good to be a bit skeptical of some of these old species, especially with loricate ciliates, which are usually identified entirely by the shape of the house they build. Loricate peritrich groups tend to have a lot of species, because small differences in the loricas are very conspicuous (while the cells themselves are nearly indistinguishable!). However, species were often based on a small number of observations from a single site, and the original description can't give us any sense of the normal morphological variation within the "species."
V. tincta is common and widely reported, so it is a pretty harmless "catch-all" for critters with wide-mouthed, cylindrical loricas.
Kahl's V. amphora is based on just a few specimens found in an inland saltwater sample, none attached to their original substrate. It's been reported at some marine locations, but the standards of identification in reports of that kind are usually not high. Penard's V. ceratophylli was found on the plant Ceratophyllum, and he says it is very similar to V. chaperoni except for a sort of protruding plate at the bottom of the lorica (which we don't see here). That observation could be " an optical illusion caused by an adhering layer" (Lu et al., 2019).
V. tincta is common and widely reported, so it is a pretty harmless "catch-all" for critters with wide-mouthed, cylindrical loricas.
Kahl's V. amphora is based on just a few specimens found in an inland saltwater sample, none attached to their original substrate. It's been reported at some marine locations, but the standards of identification in reports of that kind are usually not high. Penard's V. ceratophylli was found on the plant Ceratophyllum, and he says it is very similar to V. chaperoni except for a sort of protruding plate at the bottom of the lorica (which we don't see here). That observation could be " an optical illusion caused by an adhering layer" (Lu et al., 2019).