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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 30 ก.ย. 2024
- Free-living amoeba, just like these, can be found all over the world, from freshwater to marine habitats, ponds, lakes, and even small temporary accumulations of water on soil after abundant rain. They mainly feed on bacteria , algae, yeasts, fungi and other micro-organisms. They can even feed on other amoebae😬! They’re known to control populations of bacteria as they prey on them, which make them pretty important on an ecological point of view.
They crawl and eat with the use of their pseudopods and are known to engulf the entirety of their preys as they’re giving them a big deathly hug 🤗 Since they’re none-swimmers, they’re mostly found on surface interfaces like between water and plants, water and animals, water and soils and even between water and air, like when there’s a pellicule of bacteria that forms on top of my samples; that’s where those amoebae at, but you can find some on aquatic plants or at the bottom of the sample jar. These interfaces are usually rich in dissolved organic nutriments, which bacteria feed on, which attract amoebae
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Amoebae form a large groupe with enormous morphological diversity. Their size can be as small as a couple micrometers to a few millimeters in diameter. Some amoebae possess hard shells they either build with materials found in their environment or materials they secrete themselves. Even if a couple amoebae are planktonic, most live on surfaces or sediments.
Testate amoebae are also single celled organisms characterized by a shell also called test, which exhibit a large range of diversity. Some have spikes on them and are elongated while some others are flattened without any spikes at all. The shell protects the amoeba from predators and harsh environmental conditions and has a small aperture for the amoeba to take out its pseudopdia.
Some testate amoeba are able to secrete a siliceous or calcareous shells on their own while others take some materials from their environment to build their shells! The materials can include sand grains or diatoms for example.
Testate amoeba are found in every continent from tropical regions to the ice cold weathers of the Arctic and Antarctic! They can be found in freshwater and marine sediments but also in mosses and soils! It seems that they’re most abundant in lake sediments and wetland but can basically be found in every soils and sediments around the globe.
Video taken with my iPhone mounted on a BA310E Motic microscope with an @ilabcam adapter 🔬
References:
Beyens, Louis, and Ralf Meisterfeld. "Protozoa: testate amoebae." Tracking environmental change using lake sediments. Springer, Dordrecht, 2002. 121-153.
Charman, Dan J. "Testate amoebae." Handbook of Sea-level Research. Wiley, Chichester (2015): 281-294.
Salvador Rodríguez-Zaragoza (1994) Ecology of Free-Living Amoebae, Critical Reviews in Microbiology, 20:3, 225-241.
Warren, A., Esteban, G. F., & Finlay, B. J. (2016). Protozoa. Thorp and Covich’s Freshwater Invertebrates, 5-37.
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