This amoeba eats prey like owls do

Below the microscope, one water-filled petri dish was teeming with spherical, reddish, motionless blobs — what vampyrellids appear like after feeding. However close by algae lacked telltale feeding holes.

Time-lapse pictures confirmed the amoebas have been vampyrellids. However they didn’t feed like different microscopic vampires. The unicellular blobs engulfed and cut up aside Closterium algae cells, sucking out the insides and tossing the remaining.

“We simply couldn’t imagine it at first,” Suthaus says. “In fact, the query turns into, nicely, how precisely do [the amoebas] do it?”

Feeding experiments revealed that S. ruptor retains engulfed algae in a particular compartment. Enzymes on this chamber seem to dissolve one aspect of the prey’s cell wall. The opposite aspect is hooked up to the chamber wall. Because the compartment expands, the algae cell swings open like a shelled pistachio. S. ruptor then reaches into itself to scoop up its meal, bundling up and spitting out the empty cell wall. 

The odd vampyrellids belong to a beforehand undescribed genus and species, a genetic evaluation suggests. The genus identify Strigomyxa, which derives from the traditional Greek phrases for owl and mucus or slime, is a nod to the microbe’s owllike regurgitation habits.

“If you see related pellet-casting in plenty of different organisms, they’ve a number of cells that fulfill a number of features. And it is a single cell doing the sort of mechanistic motion,” Suthaus says. “It tells us concerning the ingenuity of evolution.”