by Christoph
When you leave 𝕏 (formerly Twitter), it means that among the “bookmarks” you take with you, you will also come across some that contain images or videos that are mainly nice to look at and even entertaining. Two of these – no, none of the infamous cat pictures – are included today in Lost & Found #4.
Bookmark #1
Here at STC, we don't usually consider Cnidaria aka jellyfish, but these tiny, frolicking Pelagia noctiluca juveniles caught my eye. Guided by an expert paper, I assume the majority are in Ephyra Stage 2 and have a diameter of ~4 mm. I'd be happy to award them the title Small Things h.c. (honoris causa). Keep on dancing!
Happy World Jellyfish Day! To celebrate, a video of the first Pelagia ephyrae raised in our new facility in Banyuls-sur-Mer pic.twitter.com/rlGndDLsjx
— Cnidevo Lab (@cnidevolab) November 3, 2022
If the tweet is no longer available, you can see a screen capture here, and the video here (GIF).
Bookmark #2
Early in 2024, Roberto revisited the Origins of Multicellularity in STC. There is no mention in Roberto's piece of a particularly exciting discovery of obligate bacterial multicellularity that Will Ratcliff (@wcratcliff.bsky.social ) pointed out in his tweet from 2022. This bacterium from the Betaproteobacteria, Jeongeupia sacculi sp. nov. HS-3, has a unique multicellular life cycle, forming ordered colonies of filamentous cells that eject unicellular coccobacilli (propagules) when submerged. (You might think of fruiting bodies made by Myxococcus xanthus and you weren't completely wrong, but HS‑3 is of a different phylum). Will continued in this thread: "This paper, 14 years in the making, is well worth reading. It's a great example of the long-tail of multicellular diversity still left to discover: it's not in-your-face obvious the way plants and animals are, but is context-dependent and quite alien feeling. Check it out!" I concur, go read Cave Bacteria: Illuminating a new path to multicellularity, co-authored by Will, and the original paper Novel multicellular prokaryote discovered next to an underground stream (Open Access).
A new paper in eLife describes a novel multicellular bacterium discovered in a Japanese cave. It has a unique multicellular cycle (forming ordered colonies that eject unicellular propagules when submerged), and helps us understand how the environment shapes MC evolution. pic.twitter.com/6crKywAVRp
— Will Ratcliff (@wc_ratcliff) October 11, 2022
If the tweet is no longer available, you can see a screen capture here, and the image here.
Bookmark #3
Silvia Ramundo (@ramundo_silvia on 𝕏, @sramundo.bsky.social on Bluesky), who studies algae & other green organisms and "often tortures" chloroplasts, as she says, re‑tweeted this eye-catching video of Micrasterias by microscopic images (@microscopicture.bsky.social). Micrasterias (μικρός tiny; ἄστρον star) is a unicellular green alga of the order Desmidiales. Its species vary in size reaching up to hundreds of microns (Wikipedia). If you want to know more about this alga, I recommend the comprehensive paper Micrasterias as a Model System in Plant Cell Biology by Ursula Lütz-Meindl (Open Access).
Algae are cool 😍 https://t.co/XvFvBBkNV7
— Silvia Ramundo (@ramundo_silvia) July 29, 2023
If the tweet is no longer available, you can see a screen capture here, and the video here (GIF).
As fine as this video is, I needed to be able to look closer, and I found what I was looking for on the YouTube channel MicroBizkaia. In this video by ©Luis Carlos Cesteros you can clearly see cytoplasmic streaming, the pyrenoids embedded in the huge chloroplasts in each half-cell and the tiny mitochondria (1:11) gathered around the nucleus particularly well.
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