My first youtube movie

This is the sort of thing I spend my time looking at these days:



It's Asplanchna. They're rotifers. We try to infect them with oomycetes. Fascinating, right? I find them cute but it's hard to see in this movie. There's another one that someone else made...



They actually pretty much suck at catching food so I'm surprised (1) that they survive at all and (2) that this person was able to catch one eating. The food pretty much has to swim into their mouths, or whatever you call their corona hole thing. Here are some Asplanchna fun facts:

Female Asplanchna have no designated hole for receiving the sexual reproductive matter from male Asplanchna, which are small and triangular and don't do anything but fertilize the female Asplanchna. The male pretty much just picks a place on the soft body of the female.

If you try to open up an Asplanchna with a pair of dissecting pins, it's pretty much like trying to dissect a jell-o mold to access the fruit...

Asplanchna do not preserve as well as other zooplankton, probably because they don't have a carapace, so it's good to count them the same day you catch them.

When an Asplanchna runs into a Dapnia or Copepod, it pretty much just sits there and gets its ass kicked with the antennules, resembling a fat kid on a playground. I'm going to try to make a movie of this phenomenon because I find it hillarious.