Small Things Considered

More Respect For the Silicon Cycle, Please

by Elio | Silicon is the second most abundant element within Earth’s crust and is necessary for the livelihood of protists, plants, and animals. Maybe best known, silica (SiO₂ or opal) is used by marine organisms such as diatoms and rhizarians to build their glassy and often beautiful shells. Read more →

Ocean's Tiniest Predator – Um, Really?

by Christoph | Three months ago, I introduced to this blog "Ocean's Ti­ni­est Pre­da­tor" based on a very re­cent pa­per by Ka­men­na­ya et al. (2018) who claimed to have iden­ti­fied Braa­ru­do­sphae­ra bi­ge­lo­wii, a mem­ber of the pho­to­syn­the­tic al­gal clade Hap­to­phy­ta, as a pre­da­tor of the abun­dant ma­ri­ne Cya­no­bac­te­ri­um Pro­chlo­ro­coc­cus. Our rea­der Be­ne­det­to pointed out... Read more →

The Nuclear Option

by Christoph | When considering "Who ate whom?", you're likely to think of the eukaryotes. They gobble up just about everything by pha­gocytosis, a common property of unicellular protists and cells of more complex multicellular eukaryotes such as us humans (macrophages, for example ). And whether it's microplastics, mineral fibers like asbes­tos, organic debris or living... Read more →

Ocean's Tiniest Predator

by Christoph | In popular terms, the marine food chain goes like this: "phytoplankton feed the zooplankton that feed the small fish (larvae) and crustaceans that feed the larger fish that feed the even bigger fish that feed us". Thus we have us, Homo sapiens, together with the great white shark, Carcharodon carcharias, and... Read more →

Meet the Xenophyophores!

by Chris Mah | So, following up with all of the NOAA deep-sea 'Okeanos Explorer' stuff, I've found that I am just fascinated  by these things called xenophyophores! The name means "Bearer of foreign bodies". But what are they? To put it simply, they are giant, deep-sea amoebas that live in large, sediment "houses" called "tests"... Read more →

A Snippet: Oceanic Conversations

by Elio | In the ocean, bacteria and eukaryotic microbes (mainly the phytoplankton) interact in various ways, some mutually beneficial, others detrimental. Many, perhaps most of these interactions, take place via chemical communications. If you had a hydro phone-like gadget that could detect chemicals instead of sound, the racket would be deafening. Yet, we know little about these goings-on. Read more →

Of Terms in Biology: Extrusomes

by Elio | Extrusomes are nasty membrane-bound structures released by ciliates and flagellates. They come in a number of varieties, the best studied being the trichocysts of paramecia. These can be discharged by the thousands per cell in response to physical stimuli, including when attacked by predators. Instead of being used... Read more →

A Snippet: More Awesome Ocelloid Surprises

by Elio | Not long ago, we posted a piece entitled "The Awesomest Thing in Biology" in which we celebrated the mind-boggling com­plexi­ties of the ocelloid, an organelle that closely resemble the vertebrate eye – in a unicellular protist! It turns out that further surprises come our way... Read more →

The Awesomest Thing in Biology

by Elio | So says a blogger by the name of Psi Wavefunction regarding an eye-like structure of some protists called the ocelloid. She wrote this in a now defunct blog eponymously called 'The Ocelloid'. I couldn't agree with her more. The ocelloid is the structural and functional equivalent of the sophisticated eye of metazoans... Read more →

Super Mario, Super Sonic, Paramecium!

by Radwa Raed Sharaf | What could those three possibly have in common? Believe it or not, they all play the role of a lead action figure in kids’ video games. Hearing the latest edition of the German biotechnology news broadcast, I was surprised to learn that researchers of the Riedel-Kruse lab at Stanford... Read more →