#suctoria

“Connecting organisms through their evolutionary relationships helps us establish a history of nature and map out the microbial work as it exists today.”

Journey to the Microcosmos- Trying to Make Sense of This Overwhelming World

“That map will likely never be complete, but the work that goes into it helps up navigate through time and space and through invisible lives, long gone, to see how our world today is connected to the microcosms of the past.”

Journey to the Microcosmos- Trying to Make Sense of This Overwhelming World

Images Originally Captured by Jam’s Germs

Summer time at the wastewater treatment plant!

Just a bunch of suctoria hanging out on floc. Taken from the aeration basins at the wastewater treatment plant.

I love suctoria - they're my favorite protozoa. They look cool (they're the ones with the hair-like tentacles coming out of them) and they're odd for ciliates in the sense that they have a nonsessile and sessile part of their life-cycle (while they are young they can move, but they attach themselves once they get comfortable with the stability of adult life). 

The name "suctoria" is a misnomer because they were originally believed to suck in their prey using those hair-like tentacles, but in reality they use those to trap their prey and move it to their mouth-area.