Amoeba
gregladen | December 2, 2015A new study, “An unexpected role for mixotrophs in the response of peatland carbon cycling to climate warming” by Vincent Jassey and others, just came out in Scientific Reports. The study is fairly preliminary, but fascinating, and unfortunately may signal that yet another effect of global warming that would result in more global warming.
What makes this study interesting is that it examines the detailed ecological relationships between several different kinds of organisms in both field and lab settings, in order to get a handle on what they do when conditions warm. Mixotrophs are organisms…
mikethemadbiologist | November 22, 2008
There's a neat Discovery News article about Gromia sphaerica, a very large testate amoeba:
A distant relative of microscopic amoebas, the grape-sized Gromia sphaerica was discovered once before, lying motionless at the bottom of the Arabian Sea. But when Mikhail Matz of the University of Texas at Austin and a group of researchers stumbled across a group of G. sphaerica off the coast of the Bahamas, the creatures were leaving trails behind them up to 50 centimeters (20 inches) long in the mud....
At up to three centimeters (1.2 inches) in diameter, they're also enormous compared to most of…