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Amoebae shelled and naked

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American


Some amoebae build elaborate houses for themselves to live in. (top and side view of an Arcellinid)

Some build their houses out of siliceous (glass) scales and peek out of them with thread-like pseudopods called filopodia. (optical sections of a Euglypha cristata from a soil sample)

Some amoebae can be naked. (Saccamoeba(?) Note the wrinkly-bulby uroid at its trailing end -- that's where extra membrane ends up after the amoeba moves)


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And spiny. (Acanthamoeba)

Sometimes even eruptive. (a Heterolobosean amoeba from soil, with contractile vacuole in act of expelling fluids at the back)

And sometimes, a house-bearing amoeba can find itself enshrouded by squishy naked cytoplasm of doom. (Our Euglypha cristata inside a no-longer-hungry amoeba. Evidently, the spines didn't help. Don't know species of the murderous amoeba, but definitely an Amoebozoan ;-))

By the way, there is an incredible site on amoebae being developed as we speak by Ferry Siemensma, arcella.nl -- pretty micrographs and lots of info on the lives of amoebae. Good for identification too. Truly a labour of love!

About Psi Wavefunction

I first encountered the wonders of the protist realm back in childhood, when a murky droplet of pond scum was revealed by the microscope to entail an alien world in its own right. It took another decade to discover there was a field and a community dedicated to these organisms, and I bade farewell to the study of more familiar big things. As a kid I was also fascinated by tales of exploration of the New World, as well as those of fantasy worlds. I was then sad that the age of surveying new landmasses on earth was over, and that human extraterrestrial adventures are unlikely to happen within our lifetimes. It seemed everything was discovered already. But that could hardly be further from the truth -- all that is necessary to begin one's own Age of Exploration is a new approach or perspective, and a healthy does of imagination. Since reality has conjured far more than the human mind alone ever could, science yields a way to write stories much wilder than fiction. All one needs to access the alien world of microbes around (and inside) them is a shift of scale by simple glass sphere.
I'm currently finishing up my undergraduate degree in Vancouver and in transition career-wise, hopefully to end up in graduate school soon. I was born in Russia (and speak the language) and spent most of my life in US and Canada. In addition to protists, I'm fascinated by evolution, including that of culture and languages, diversity and biology of cells and how they self-organise, linguistics and anthropology, particularly of the less talked-about cultures, sociology of science and plenty of totally random things that snag my attention.
Banner image was kindly post-processed and enhanced by my friend: an accomplished comic artist who goes by Achiru.

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