Microbial diversity in a paddy field water sample – Part 2
| Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 1:46 AM
DIATOMS, ROTIFERS and SOMEONE UNIQUE
The water drop sample from the paddy field further showed moving diatoms and rotifers.
One particular organism puzzled me. At first, from its bifurcated tail, I thought it was a rotifer. But on better focusing, I observed its cilia .
Was it a ciliate? It seemed too big for a ciliate. YouTube and Google explorations indicated that this was neither a rotifer nor a ciliate, but an organism called Chaetonotus , belonging to the Phylum Gastrotricha.
Chaetonotus was an incredibly fast microbe and I struggled over an entire day to capture its movements in my videos. At the end of the day, when I finally recorded this video, this poor Chaetonotus must have been exhausted, as its movements had become very slow. I later learnt that the average life span of a gastrotrich is only around 3-21 days.
Look out for the next post!
See
Part 1
and
Part 3
of this series.
Cheers for now!
Ashalatha
with Debashree, Jayashree, Chandrika
Locations
Categories
Type of Sample
Foldscope Lens Magnification
