Vorticella convallaria is a ciliated protozoan found in freshwater habitats. In the sessile or stalked trophont form, V. convallaria is shaped somewhat like a balloon as it has a body or zooid (the head of the balloon) that is about 40 µm large with cilia around its oral part, and a stalk (the string of a balloon) anchoring the zooid to a solid surface. When a trophont zooid of V. convallaria is detached from the stalk, the zooid swims around in water by creating water flow using its oral cilia. In contrast to the stalk contraction of V. convallaria that has been well studied, the swimming motility of V. convallaria is little known. In this study, we measured the swimming trajectories of the stalkless trophont zooid of V. convallaria using video microscopy and Hele-Shaw cells with a gap height of 25 μm, which is a little more than half the zooid length, traced the swimming zooid using image processing, and analyzed the swimming motion in terms of swimming velocity and mean square displacement. Harvested Vorticella cells were allowed to attach to the bottom of a petri dish and then to grow their stalk. Gentle scrapings detached the Vorticella zooids from the stalks, and water containing destalked zooids was confined between two slide-glasses with 25 μm thick spacers. Then the cells were imaged with an inverted microscope and a digital camera, and the centroid of swimming Vorticella zooids was traced in the obtained images via image processing using MATLAB. The stalkless trophont zooid of V. convallaria was found to swim in circular patterns with intermittent ballistic motions in the confinement, and the average swimming speed ranged from 20 μm/s to 110 μm/s. Since the swimming pattern of V. convallaria appeared to be affected by the level of confinement, we will continue characterizing the ciliate’s swimming in the Hele-Shaw cell with different gap heights. Our study is expected to reveal the swimming motility of V. convallaria and to advance general understanding of swimming of microorganisms.

Swimming of the Trophont Zooid of Vorticella Convallaria

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/FEDSM/FEDSM2021/volume/85284

ASME 2021 Fluids Engineering Division Summer Meeting (FEDSM2021)

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