Natural History Wanderings

Mono Lake Committe reports

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley discovered a new organism living in Mono Lake’s water—a species of choanoflagellate they named Barroeca monosierra.

Choanoflagellates are single-celled, microscopic organisms that primarily feed on bacteria. Scientists have found that B. monosierra is unique because instead of only consuming bacteria, the organism forms large colonies that contain live bacteria and form a stable relationship with them. “To our knowledge, this is the first report of such an interaction between choanoflagellates and bacteria,” reads the researchers’ paper, which was published in the American Society for Microbiology.

Source: Organism new to science found in Mono Lake’s water