NocturnalSea on DeviantArthttps://www.deviantart.com/nocturnalsea/art/Inner-Space-2-369968743NocturnalSea

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Inner Space 2

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Another landscape of microbial life. I deliberately designed this one to resemble a museum diorama.
The strange, tree-like structures are tube-building Floscularia rotifers. In the understory, the "coral-bush" organisms are colonial flagellates (Hyalobryon ramosum) and the larger, solitary tube-dwellers are Stichotricha secunda. The lumpy yellow balls are testate amoebas (Pseudodifflugia gracilis), which build a hard shell out of cemented sand grains.

The giant floating "planets" are colonies of proterospongia choanoflagellates-- which may be the ancestors of sponges and, by extension, all multicellular animals.

The plesiosaur-like organisms wimming through the the middle are two species of "trunked" ciliates. The green ones are Lacrymaria olor and the blue are Dileptus anser. Both ciliate species possess a long flexible "trunk" that they snake through the sediment in search of prey. In real life, both ciliates inhabit the muddy sediment, but for this piece I used a bit of artistic license and made them into free-swimmers. On the ground below the two Dileptus is a "trunked" amoeba (Oscillosignum proboscideum) that can produce an elongated pseudopod to search for food in the same manner as the ciliates.

Go here: [link] and here: [link] to see some cool real-life videos of trunked ciliates.

To the right, the brown, cymbal-shaped "creature" is actually a mobile colony of bryozoans (Oscillosignum proboscideum). The colony's "legs" are actually highly modified zooids called "setiform avicularian mandibles".

In the bottom center of the piece, just below the Oscillosignum amoeba are three testate amoebas (Arcella vulgaris) that have an unusual method of flipping over. If an individual Arcella is knocked onto its back, it's pseudopodia cannot reach around its shell to touch the ground. To right itself, the amoeba secretes a gas bubble into one end of its shell, thus raising that end up and tilting the pseudopodia over far enough so that the organism cna grab hold of the ground and right itself.

The two odd spiny-mask looking ciliates floating through the sky in the upper left are Discomorphella pectinata.
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kolroling's avatar

Is this based on the Ediacaran period?