Difflugia Acuminata is a species of testate amoebae. Its test, or shell, is xenogenic, meaning that the amoeba captured and agglutinated hard materials together, sometimes including empty diatom frustules or maybe live diatoms.
Visible extending up to the top left corner of the photo are a few lobose ectoplasmic pseudopodia.
While looking through a bit of floating pond debris, I encountered this enormous amoeba. I did a quick estimate and concluded that this cell was around 700 – 1000 micrometers long (for reference, 1000 micrometers = 1 millimeter, 1/10th of a centimeter). This amoeba is likely multinucleate and from the genus Pelomyxa or Chaos.
Vampyrella is a small-medium sized amoeba that feeds primarily on algal filaments. It first bores a hole in the cell wall, and then proceeds to suck out the cytoplasm.
Vampyrella is the small orange-ish blob in the center of the photo.
The Heliozoa (also called sun-animalcules) are a phylum of amoebae that possess axopodia.
At first, it was difficult to tell if this was an ameoba or not… fortunately, after it moved a little and extened a few filopodia, it was confirmed.
The red arrow in the attached photomicrograph points to the amoeba’s nucleus. Nuclei can be hard to identify, as they are often similary to contractile vacuoles or food vacuoles. A simple method for identifying nuclei is to look for a circular or near-circular body, the outermost layer being clear, and the innerost spherical layer being a bit darker and/or granular than its surrounding layer. To the left of the nucleus, for comparison, is a food vacuole.
The photomicrograph above exhibits a desmid (the large green thing), and a much smaller filopodial amoeba (the little blob right of the desmid).
An amoeba squishing its way across the slide.
