Single-celled Didinium Eats a Paramecium
Pardon my French but Merlin's smelly pants, what a scene! And it's in real-time!!!
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Didinium is a vicious hunter, it has a arrow-head like cell mouth where it attaches itself onto the prey, releases toxins to immobilize it and opens its mouth wide enough to swallow the whole organism.
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You can see in the first clip that there are needle-like structures appearing after Didinium touches the Paramecium, those are actually coming out from the Paramecium, they are called the trichocysts and they work as a defense mechanism for the paramecia. Paramecium usually able to repel the attacks with them, the trichocysts ejected from the cell membrane so fast it pushes the attacker away, don't let the predators to get good hold on the prey. Fascinating isn’t it?
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This is just a single example of prey and predator interaction out of millions you can find in the microworld. I hope you get my fascination about all those things better now?