Singapore Protozoans Part 2 - A Murky Pond

After looking at today's sample (from a small pond in the botany garden at NUS) under the microscope I think I might hesitate to stick my hands into warm murky pond water again. It's absolutely crawling with bacteria, and to illustrate what I mean by crawling I've even got a video:

Bacteria moving from brandon seah on Vimeo.

On the bright side, that means there's plenty of protists grazing on all these bacteria, including lots of small bacterivorous ciliates, and gliding euglenids (photo below). I really think that they look like twisted potato chips, don't you too? Diatom and dinoflagellates were common, but I saw more empty tests and frustules than living cells.

"Potato chip" euglenids with flagellum that points in the direction of motion.

One of the highlights was a big amoeba which had really awesome cytoplasmic streaming and which moved by blebbing outwards in a way which is easier to show than to describe in words.

Large Amoeba from brandon seah on Vimeo.

See the full set of photographs on Flickr. [Update 6/9/11 - I've moved all the photos to my new protist website and the Flickr album is no longer available.]