Yesterday, scraping from the bottom of the sea water table, I found these mysterious jumping ciliates? I’m calling them ciliates since Manu has found some in the past..

Here’s a first video of 2 of them in sync with gif.

It was so beautiful to watch them go. If someone can ID them (@laks, @manup) that would be awesome. I’ll add more videos below to give you a better view.

This video really shows some crazy jumps they make to go out of field of view..

In this video, i mounted them on a compound microscope (10X) to get a better view. Fyi, i recorded the video using my iPhone connected by a tool i ordered off amazon called snap zoom. If you have scope and wanted to attach your phone to it to take for e.g. high-speed videos, i recommend it. Of course, the foldscope is sufficient, but i was curious to compare 🙂

In the video below I noticed something peculiar – it appears as if the ciliate is laying eggs? Can someone confirm? Im not sure how ciliates reproduce..

I also captured some high-speed videos at 240 frames per second. It gives a good sense of how they exploit the ciliary motion to jump.

And here’s just another video of it swimming about.

This post is open to read and review on The Winnower.