This animal is mainly found in oligo saprobic water of pools and puddles in spring and autumn.
Rotifers or wheel animalcules have lobes on their bodies that look like rotating toothed wheels under the light microscope. These parts consist of small protrusions that move back and forth quickly. This creates a vortex with which the rotifer sucks in dead organic material, algae and protozoa.
An important part of the rotifer is the chewing device, the mastax, a set of muscles and hard, sclerified parts. Depending on the shape and dimensions of the parts of the chewing device, the function differs and there is specialization in grinding, gripping, sucking or drilling. This can be seen in the video, where the animal taps into the cells of an algae one by one to suck in the cell contents.
There are about 2000 different types of rotifers. They have a great diversity of body shapes, which are perfectly adapted to their different living environments. Species that settle on a substrate have small ‘feet’, while swimming rotifers have feather-like organs that allow them to speed through the water.
Rotifers have two sexes, male or female. With a size of approx. 2 mm, the females can be seen with the naked eye. Males do not grow after hatching and are sometimes only 0.04 mm in size, rather small in fact. They cannot be seen without a microscope. Despite the two sexes, the males are not always necessary for reproduction. The females can reproduce asexually. They then lay eggs from which only daughters come. In doing so, they actually clone themselves. In some species, the males are so underdeveloped that they no longer have digestive organs and die shortly after birth.
Motic AE31E Inverted Microscope
Copyrigt: willemsmicroscope.com