Infusoria-trumpeter: structure, reproduction, meaning in nature

2024 Author: Henry Conors | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-02-12 02:45

The entire Internet is filled with articles about ciliates-shoes. While information about trumpeters is very poor, it is not often possible to get acquainted with them, apart from the fact that they are one of the most typical inhabitants of water bodies.

Infusoria-trumpeter is sometimes mistaken for suvok or rotifers. The stories of knowledgeable people seemed not like the truth, few could believe that such marvelous protozoa exist in the world.

Origin of the name

The name of this infusoria speaks for itself. It came from her appearance. The shape of its body ciliates stentor resembles a gramophone pipe or horn. It resembles a smoothly expanding stalk, which at the end turns into a bell in the same way as a certain wind instrument. However, ciliates are like this only when they are calm. If disturbed, she will immediately become like a ball thanks to her muscle fibers.

Freshwater ciliates-trumpeters represent the Trumpeter family, in which the genus Stentor (Trumpeter) is located. The name Stentor is found in ancient Greek myths. This is a herald with a strong voice, hisused to announce the decrees of the king.

Stentor brief description

In short, what stentors are, they are floating and sessile ciliates. Infusoria-trumpeter (brief description): the lower part is a contractile, elongated stalk that has the ability to attach the ciliate to objects under water. This action occurs with the help of mucus secreted by stentors.

Expecting danger, the trumpeter's stalk quickly begins to contract, at which time his entire body contracts. To save his life, a ciliate trumpeter can shrink in a matter of fractions of a second by a third of its length! It returns to its initial position more slowly, this time is 10 seconds. The contraction is facilitated by the presence of muscle fibers inside the cell.

Besides this, it has its own remarkable security ability. The ciliate trumpeter has on its body an innumerable number of small holes in which rods with dense tips containing poison are hidden. An individual hit by such a weapon is immediately paralyzed, in the worst case, it dies.

Infusoria is spreading at high speed. The explanation is the unpretentiousness, as well as the ease of movement of its rounded cysts by the wind, waterfowl, insects and other living organisms. Cysts form at temperatures below 0 degrees C.

Appearance

The body of the stentor has a characteristic funnel shape, its front end is expanded in the form of a bell. It contains a peristomal field, along the outer edge of which long cilia merge to formmembranella around the mouth.

Small cilia under the shell cover the entire body of the ciliate in longitudinal rows. There are species whose body has only their own color: the trumpeter is blue or blue and the trumpeter is green.

Ciliates come in sizes from 1.2 mm to 3 mm. Their appearance may be as follows:

• Motile.

• Sedentary.

• Colonial.

• Solitary.

• Shape-changing cells.• Non-changing cell shape.

The top of the cell is covered with endoplasm, which has a glandular appearance, and a rather dense shell.

Infusoria-trumpeter: taxonomy

If we consider trumpeters from the point of view of systematics, then these protozoa are in the order of ciliated ciliates. Like close relatives, they have two different types of cilia on their bodies - short and long.

Short cilia, which are meant for swimming, cover the stentor's body more evenly. Long cilia are located near the mouth, closely adjacent to one another. They serve to guide water to the opening of the mouth. No difference between them was noticed, except for the length, their structure is the same.

Food

Protozoa are characterized by all vital functions, including nutrition. What they eat and how digestion occurs in a stentor is a very interesting question. The ciliate trumpeter considers bacteria to be its main food. Along with them, food objects are also small protozoa, planktonic algae and others that are inwater particles.

Usually trumpeters, violating the laws of mechanics, swim with the extended end of the body forward. This slow movement helps them successfully capture their intended prey. Small food enters through the mouth opening further into the tubular pharynx. The remains after digestion come out through the powder. Infusoria is a very voracious creature, her mouth is always open, she constantly eats. Only during the breeding season, this process stops. Most of them are considered predators.

Lifestyle

The nuclei are the main regulatory center of the stentor. They are designed to ensure that all processes in the cell can proceed correctly and violations are quickly corrected. Ciliates trumpeter has an amazing ability to quickly bring his body back to its original form after damage. Even when it is cut into several parts, after a while each of them turns into a small stentor, and then, with intensive feeding, acquires its original size.

The only thing needed for this is the presence of a macronucleus in the remaining part.

When you take a drop of water from a pond with fallen leaves and put it under a microscope, you will have the opportunity to observe the life of such small representatives of the world of microscopic animals, which is very interesting.

Stentor: internal structure

The stentor has one contractile vacuole. It consists of a reservoir and leading channels. A characteristic feature that the structure of the ciliates represents is a large macronucleus nucleus. Next to it are several small micronuclei.

The trumpeter also has a small nucleus, sometimes there are several of them. The structure of the infusoria is as follows: the developing digestive vacuole, cilia, crystals, mouth, digestive vacuole, place for removing food residues (powder), nucleus and nucleolus, contractile vacuole.

Infusoria-trumpeter: reproduction

Stentors tend to reproduce asexually. It is carried out by multiple transverse division, division into two or budding, which tends to occur in a free-moving state.

During asexual reproduction, division of all nuclei occurs, this process is repeated by the trumpeter two or three times a week at different intervals. The rate of this type of reproduction depends on various reasons, these are, first of all, environmental conditions: temperature, amount of food, etc.

The division of the micronucleus occurs mitonically. The macronucleus divides in a peculiar way and is characterized by DNA doubling. When dividing ciliates, some cytoplasmic organelles can be observed. They usually refer to the offspring, which have new cilia and mouth openings re-formed.

Infusoria begins to feed vigorously and grow, after which it multiplies again. Scientists have conducted a large number of experiments to answer the question of how long these animals can reproduce asexually.

Experiments have shown that throughseveral generations in the life cycle of ciliates, the sexual process of reproduction or conjugation must necessarily occur, during which two individuals touch each other with the abdomen. At the junction, the membrane dissolves, forming a cytoplasmic bridge. Macronuclei begin to break down and divide into 4 micronucleus nuclei. Three of them are completely destroyed, and in the fourth there is a division in half. The result is the formation of a male and female nucleus in each ciliate.

Thus, the sexual process of reproduction does not affect the increase in the number of stentors. It only contributes to the renewal of hereditary properties and the emergence of new combinations of genetic information.

Stentor: value in nature

Ciliates, like other similar protozoa, play the role of orderlies, clean water from pollution, eating harmful bacteria and decaying organic residues. The number of animals can determine the degree of water pollution.

Stentors in food chains are one of the first components. If favorable conditions contribute to this, they multiply very quickly, and a myriad of these protozoa become a favorite food for larvae and fry of fish, small crustaceans, insects of water bodies and their larvae. The latter, in turn, become food for larger animals in water bodies, as well as for fish fry.

You can talk about these amazing creatures endlessly. The trumpeter infusoria, the meaning of which in nature still remains a mystery, makes scientists workover the search for all the answers about this creature. Much remains to be done to know and understand such a small protozoan.