This ciliate is HUNGRY 🍔 I find so many of these smol beans with beautiful coloured vacuoles, they’re called Ophryoglena and are part of the the Oligohymenophorea class, just like Paramecia and Tetrahymena! The vacuoles are filled with food and their colour usually depends of which colour the food has. This one had found a dead Ostracod with what seems to be lots of small silver coloured lipid droplets, nom nom sounds like a delicious meal 🥹 Ophryoglena are found in freshwater often scavenging on dead aquatic invertebrates like Copepods, Daphnias, insect larvae and various worms. They eat by rubbing their mouth in their food while turning around, as you can see in the video 😂 Some species are also parasites of insects, fishes and mussels, especially zebra mussels, and can be found in great numbers within their digestive gland. Ophryoglena has a complex life cycle with a feeding stage called trophont which have a pointy anterior end, then it encysts as a mouthless tomont , which produces theronts, the morphologically elongated stage which seeks out new preys to feed on! The individual from the third seems in its tomont stage since the isn’t there anymore but the cell is still moving, while the other videos demonstrate an Ophryoglena in its feeding trophont stage😄 Video taken with my iPhone mounted on a BA310E Motic microscope with an @ilabcam ultra adapter 🔬 Reference: Lynn, D. (2008). The ciliated protozoa: characterization, classification, and guide to the literature. Springer Science & Business Media. #fyp #microscope #science #snack