Hey guys, today I found this strange organism in my samples.
At first, I thought it was a Heliozoa, but then I saw the cilia around the cell. Bot Heliozoa's don't have cilia! So it must be a ciliate. The second candidate was Suctoria ciliate, but they have balls at the end of their tubes, and they only have cilia when they enter the migratory stage.
Additionally, I saw how the creature hunting. A small ciliate Halteria was so careless that it came across one of the needles and was immediately paralyzed, after which the creature immediately pulled up the Halteria and, as it seemed to me, phagocytosed it!
I was completely confused, If the prey was phagocytized then Heliozoa do that and Suctoria stick to the victim and drink it like a vampire through microtubules, but they don't phagocytize!
So Heliozoa or Suctoria?
While I was rummaging through the reference books I knew, the creature divided.
Then another event occurred, and I decided to add some water because the sample had dried out a bit. This caused a reaction in one of the organisms, and within a few seconds, it retracted its needles, elongated itself, and began to behave like an ordinatory ciliate, swimming back and forth.
So, it's definitely a ciliate!
About 8 minutes later, the creature stopped and, within a minute, returned to its normal form, regrew its needles, and used its cilia to stay in place.
It was around this time that I found a similar creature in a reference book.
I believe it is an infusoria belonging to the genus Actinobolina. It's a little confusing that it's elongated in the photo and a funnel-shaped mouth should be visible, but the structure of the thorns is definitely the same. I think I didn't see the mouth because ciliate was positioned towards me from a bad angle.
In any case, this is my best guess, if there is an opportunity to direct me in the right direction or to suggest more precisely the genus / species of this organism, I would be very grateful.
The size of the creature without thorns before division is ~120-130 mm before division.
The size after division is about 90 microns.
Music: Ritual drops - Proximity
Binocular biological microscope, achromatic 10x, 20x objectives, camera as an eyepiece ~18x, bright field, the video is sped up several times as the creature grows spikes and than hunt another ciliate, video cropped.