microcosmos
Strange Stentor Stories
YouTube: | https://youtube.com/watch?v=A-g7EJTVlks |
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Likes: | 5,253 |
Comments: | 196 |
Duration: | 08:51 |
Uploaded: | 2020-11-30 |
Last sync: | 2024-12-01 08:00 |
This episode is sponsored by Awesome Socks Club, a sock subscription for charity. Go to http://awesomesocks.club/microcosmos to sign up between now and December 11th to get a new pair of fun socks each month in 2021. 100% of after-tax profit will go to decrease maternal and child mortality in Sierra Leone, which is one of the most dangerous places to be pregnant in the world.
Our giant Stentor friends are back with more strange stories about these mysterious giants!
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Twitter: https://twitter.com/hankgreen
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Music by Andrew Huang:
https://www.youtube.com/andrewhuang
Journey to the Microcosmos is a Complexly production.
Find out more at https://www.complexly.com
Stock video from:
https://www.videoblocks.com
SOURCES:
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.5b02273
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/jez.1401270306
https://academic.oup.com/plankt/article/24/1/69/1543140
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6101732/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0014482757900113?via%3Dihub
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2019.0167
Our giant Stentor friends are back with more strange stories about these mysterious giants!
Follow Journey to the Microcosmos:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/journeytomicro
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JourneyToMicro
Support the Microcosmos:
http://www.patreon.com/journeytomicro
More from Jam’s Germs:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jam_and_germs
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCn4UedbiTeN96izf-CxEPbg
Hosted by Hank Green:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/hankgreen
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/vlogbrothers
Music by Andrew Huang:
https://www.youtube.com/andrewhuang
Journey to the Microcosmos is a Complexly production.
Find out more at https://www.complexly.com
Stock video from:
https://www.videoblocks.com
SOURCES:
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.5b02273
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/jez.1401270306
https://academic.oup.com/plankt/article/24/1/69/1543140
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6101732/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0014482757900113?via%3Dihub
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2019.0167
This episode is sponsored by Awesome Socks Club, a sock subscription for charity.
Click the link in the description to sign up between now and December 11th to get a new pair of fun socks each month in 2021. For all of us on the Microcosmos team, Stentors are the gift that is always giving.
They were the first organism we did a deep dive episode on because we wanted more people to get a chance to appreciate how magnificent this very unappreciated unicellular organism is. And now with our fancy new DIC microscope, we’ve gotten the chance to appreciate their magnificence in new ways. It is amazing how changing bits of light can give you a new perspective. Scientists have been studying Stentors for well over a century, and that’s given them plenty of time to find new ways to learn about them. And sometimes those methods are pretty normal.
For example, in 1995 there were reports that a lake in Germany had turned black. And there was a clear culprit: a large number of Stentor amethystinus. And for one group of scientists, this “black-spot” bloom was an opportunity to put their plankton nets to good use and collect some samples. They gathered the Stentor amethystinus particularly to study the purplish pigment amethystin that gives the species its name, isolating the molecule so they could determine its structure and compare it to other pigments. The coloring is unique among stentors, and it stands out particularly when you compare it to the vivid blue of Stentor coeruleus. Stentor coeruleus gets its color from a pigment called stentorin, which helps the stentor respond to light and also serves a defensive function.
And while Stentor coeruleus is a much-studied organism, this pigment has turned up in strange places. In the mid-2000s, people began observing that the blue catfish of Eufaula Lake in Oklahoma were producing some strange eggs. Nothing was wrong with them, but they were a reddish purple color. Roughly a quarter of the female catfish were laying purple eggs instead of their normal yellowish cream-colored eggs. And when scientists investigated further, they found that the ovaries of the female catfish had become purple as well.
All that color came from stentorin. The lake had likely experienced blooms of Stentor coeruleus, which accumulated in the lake after the release of organic pollutants. As the Stentor’s numbers increased, so did their consumption by the catfish.
And that then drove to the accumulation of stentorin inside the catfish’s ovaries, affecting the color of the eggs. Stentor coeruleus’s color makes it easy to spot, but other species can be more difficult to tell apart. We’ve labeled this one Stentor roeseli, but to be completely honest, we’re not sure if that’s exactly what it is. It might be a similar looking species called Stentor magnus, but we can’t tell them apart just by looking at them.
If we had a Stentor magnus and a Stentor roeseli side-by-side, we could not tell you just by looking at them whether they were the same organism. There is, however, a weird and gruesome way to solve that mystery. It’s called grafting. To start, you take your two mystery stentors and you cut them in half.
Then you quickly take half of stentor number one and press it to half of stentor number 2 at the exposed edge of both organisms. Because they’re stentors and amazingly good at regeneration, the two halves will fuse together, like a “Frankenstein’s microbe.” If your two original stentors are the same species, that fusion will survive. If they’re two different species, most likely it will die. Though intrepid stentor stitches have found that the degree to which these different halves are incompatible varies with different species and different combinations. And we don’t know for certain which ones will work, just that it’s a thing that maybe we should test out ourselves one day.
Underlying grafting is that remarkable regenerative ability of Stentors, which we’ve described at length before. But to summarize: stentors are just really good at rebuilding themselves when they need to. Maybe you’re looking at this unicellular organism and thinking, “Well, it’s just one cell, how complicated can it be?” Pretty complicated, it turns out!
So complicated that we still don’t really know how this regeneration works. Scientists have been trying to figure this out for over a century, and the mystery remains unsolved though at this point at least very well-documented. And for more than a century, scientists have been passing down techniques to cut stentors into pieces. There’s the obvious surgical technique, using a needle to cut a stentor into pieces and then watch it reconstruct several new versions of itself.
But you can also bathe stentors in a sugar solution, and the organism will then shed its oral apparatus (which is its version of a mouth). It’s not clear why this happens, but it allows scientists to watch the stentor rebuild that one portion of its body. Scientists used this method to study how Stentor coeruleus resets the movement of its cilia after regenerations.
Cilia may look like little bits of hair lining the organism, but they act more like a coordinated set of limbs that help draw in food and move the stentor around. Lots and lots of limbs that are moving together in a complex dance that in turn creates patterns of movement in the water surrounding the stentor. And the scientists watched as the stentors were able to rebuild this whole complex system again. They found that it takes about 5 hours just to grow those oral cilia back to an observable length, and then another two hours for the cilia to start coordinating their movements. So much work went into understanding the timeline of this one narrow process in regeneration, and there is still so much mechanical mystery underlying it.
Not to mention all the other feats of regenerative prowess that stentors casually perform on a regular basis. But science is always advancing. And with all these mysteries to solve and more, stentors will likely find themselves at the center of many many other strange experiments and observations to come. Thank you for coming on this journey with us as we explore the unseen world that surrounds us. Now I’m gonna go out on a limb here and assume that you, person listening to this, wear socks sometimes.
And what if I told you that you could get new socks while also giving to charity? Well, that’s precisely what the Awesome Socks Club is all about. It’s a charity sock subscription where 100% of after-tax profit will go to decrease maternal and child mortality in Sierra Leone.
The socks are fun and attractive and subscribers will get a different pair designed by a different designer every month of 2021. But so we can control inventory and reduce waste, sign up are only going to be available until December 11th. So if this sounds like a club you’d like to be a part of, head on over to awesomesocks.club/microcosmos to sign up, or just click the link in the description, and remember you have to sign up by December 11th.
Thank you as always to all of these people here. They are our Patrons. They make it possible for us to make content like this for everyone who wants to see it. If you’d like to join up with them and also get some cool little perks, you can check out patreon.com/journeytomicro.
If you want to see more from our Master of Microscopes James Weiss, check out Jam & Germs on Instagram. And if you want to see more from us there’s always a subscribe button somewhere nearby.
Click the link in the description to sign up between now and December 11th to get a new pair of fun socks each month in 2021. For all of us on the Microcosmos team, Stentors are the gift that is always giving.
They were the first organism we did a deep dive episode on because we wanted more people to get a chance to appreciate how magnificent this very unappreciated unicellular organism is. And now with our fancy new DIC microscope, we’ve gotten the chance to appreciate their magnificence in new ways. It is amazing how changing bits of light can give you a new perspective. Scientists have been studying Stentors for well over a century, and that’s given them plenty of time to find new ways to learn about them. And sometimes those methods are pretty normal.
For example, in 1995 there were reports that a lake in Germany had turned black. And there was a clear culprit: a large number of Stentor amethystinus. And for one group of scientists, this “black-spot” bloom was an opportunity to put their plankton nets to good use and collect some samples. They gathered the Stentor amethystinus particularly to study the purplish pigment amethystin that gives the species its name, isolating the molecule so they could determine its structure and compare it to other pigments. The coloring is unique among stentors, and it stands out particularly when you compare it to the vivid blue of Stentor coeruleus. Stentor coeruleus gets its color from a pigment called stentorin, which helps the stentor respond to light and also serves a defensive function.
And while Stentor coeruleus is a much-studied organism, this pigment has turned up in strange places. In the mid-2000s, people began observing that the blue catfish of Eufaula Lake in Oklahoma were producing some strange eggs. Nothing was wrong with them, but they were a reddish purple color. Roughly a quarter of the female catfish were laying purple eggs instead of their normal yellowish cream-colored eggs. And when scientists investigated further, they found that the ovaries of the female catfish had become purple as well.
All that color came from stentorin. The lake had likely experienced blooms of Stentor coeruleus, which accumulated in the lake after the release of organic pollutants. As the Stentor’s numbers increased, so did their consumption by the catfish.
And that then drove to the accumulation of stentorin inside the catfish’s ovaries, affecting the color of the eggs. Stentor coeruleus’s color makes it easy to spot, but other species can be more difficult to tell apart. We’ve labeled this one Stentor roeseli, but to be completely honest, we’re not sure if that’s exactly what it is. It might be a similar looking species called Stentor magnus, but we can’t tell them apart just by looking at them.
If we had a Stentor magnus and a Stentor roeseli side-by-side, we could not tell you just by looking at them whether they were the same organism. There is, however, a weird and gruesome way to solve that mystery. It’s called grafting. To start, you take your two mystery stentors and you cut them in half.
Then you quickly take half of stentor number one and press it to half of stentor number 2 at the exposed edge of both organisms. Because they’re stentors and amazingly good at regeneration, the two halves will fuse together, like a “Frankenstein’s microbe.” If your two original stentors are the same species, that fusion will survive. If they’re two different species, most likely it will die. Though intrepid stentor stitches have found that the degree to which these different halves are incompatible varies with different species and different combinations. And we don’t know for certain which ones will work, just that it’s a thing that maybe we should test out ourselves one day.
Underlying grafting is that remarkable regenerative ability of Stentors, which we’ve described at length before. But to summarize: stentors are just really good at rebuilding themselves when they need to. Maybe you’re looking at this unicellular organism and thinking, “Well, it’s just one cell, how complicated can it be?” Pretty complicated, it turns out!
So complicated that we still don’t really know how this regeneration works. Scientists have been trying to figure this out for over a century, and the mystery remains unsolved though at this point at least very well-documented. And for more than a century, scientists have been passing down techniques to cut stentors into pieces. There’s the obvious surgical technique, using a needle to cut a stentor into pieces and then watch it reconstruct several new versions of itself.
But you can also bathe stentors in a sugar solution, and the organism will then shed its oral apparatus (which is its version of a mouth). It’s not clear why this happens, but it allows scientists to watch the stentor rebuild that one portion of its body. Scientists used this method to study how Stentor coeruleus resets the movement of its cilia after regenerations.
Cilia may look like little bits of hair lining the organism, but they act more like a coordinated set of limbs that help draw in food and move the stentor around. Lots and lots of limbs that are moving together in a complex dance that in turn creates patterns of movement in the water surrounding the stentor. And the scientists watched as the stentors were able to rebuild this whole complex system again. They found that it takes about 5 hours just to grow those oral cilia back to an observable length, and then another two hours for the cilia to start coordinating their movements. So much work went into understanding the timeline of this one narrow process in regeneration, and there is still so much mechanical mystery underlying it.
Not to mention all the other feats of regenerative prowess that stentors casually perform on a regular basis. But science is always advancing. And with all these mysteries to solve and more, stentors will likely find themselves at the center of many many other strange experiments and observations to come. Thank you for coming on this journey with us as we explore the unseen world that surrounds us. Now I’m gonna go out on a limb here and assume that you, person listening to this, wear socks sometimes.
And what if I told you that you could get new socks while also giving to charity? Well, that’s precisely what the Awesome Socks Club is all about. It’s a charity sock subscription where 100% of after-tax profit will go to decrease maternal and child mortality in Sierra Leone.
The socks are fun and attractive and subscribers will get a different pair designed by a different designer every month of 2021. But so we can control inventory and reduce waste, sign up are only going to be available until December 11th. So if this sounds like a club you’d like to be a part of, head on over to awesomesocks.club/microcosmos to sign up, or just click the link in the description, and remember you have to sign up by December 11th.
Thank you as always to all of these people here. They are our Patrons. They make it possible for us to make content like this for everyone who wants to see it. If you’d like to join up with them and also get some cool little perks, you can check out patreon.com/journeytomicro.
If you want to see more from our Master of Microscopes James Weiss, check out Jam & Germs on Instagram. And if you want to see more from us there’s always a subscribe button somewhere nearby.