485: Small Cell Sculpts Sticky Snot Sphere

This episode: A marine protist predator traps prey microbes in an
attractive bubble of mucus, eats what it wants, and lets the rest
sink, possibly sequestering significant amounts of carbon!


Download Episode (7.8 MB, 11.4 minutes)

Show notes:
Microbe of the episode: Bat associated cyclovirus 1


News item


Takeaways


The oceans have a lot of unique, unexplored life in them. This is
true on a macro level but even more on a microscopic level, with
many different kinds of microbes of various groups with
fascinating life strategies. And despite being microscopic, with
enough of them around, they can affect the whole planet's climate
in significant ways.

In this study, one protist species gets most of its nutrients
from photosynthesis, but what it can't get from the sun, it takes
from prey microbes by force. To catch its prey, it creates an
intricate bubble of mucus called a mucosphere, and waits for
other microbes to swim into it, thinking it is food, and get
stuck. Then the predator chooses the prey cell it wants and
abandons the rest, letting them sink to the ocean floor and
locking away the carbon they contain in the process.


 


Journal Paper:
Larsson ME, Bramucci AR, Collins S, Hallegraeff G, Kahlke T,
Raina J-B, Seymour JR, Doblin MA. 2022. Mucospheres produced by a
mixotrophic protist impact ocean carbon cycling. Nat Commun
13:1301.


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