I also make videos of microscopic beings!!!

i do! :) and surely not just me. i’m positive thousands more are thankful for your commitment!

So long as you don't end up needing to explain yourself to the local constable!

"Oi! You got your bird-bath scraiping loicense?"

That’s rather poetic tho. To find life in a place of death. Thanks for the microbes tho, they’re very neat

Doing the lord's work

that would probably make their situation worse 😂

Get enough of them together....

It's not the curling that is distressing, it's the wailing.

🤣🤣🤣👍

wait thats the pink goop I found in my bird’s water bowl?!

@@mauroghen9157 Yep! Lots of tiny, stressed out algae!

@@mauroghen9157 do em good by dumping it into some drain and being on your day.

I found rotifers in my bird bath too! Do you think they are brought by the birds or they got there by the wind in the form of cysts?

Me: 😏

In german the species used for it's Astaxantin (H. pluvialis) is basically called "Blood Rain Algae". "Blood Berry Red" probably sells better in food products though.

"Mesocosmic" is so much better than "macroscopic". Never heard that word before now but it has just entered my lexicon along with the logical extensions "microcosmic" and "megacosmic". Thank you.

This is Hank! Check him out on SciShow for the his polar opposite of expression. When I watch the first one of these I was stunned to find that he was the one teaching us such interesting things about these little beings.

Saunas get that hot and people survive inside. You would not boil until your body gets that hot

I think it is reflecting more wavelengths of light so the haematococcus is protecting itself from being in the glare of more light that it can cope with. Algae need light but not too much. Light which is too intense can damage many algae - hence the protective colouration to reduce the intensity of light entering the cell.

I work with Haematococcus in the lab at the uni. As far as I know, the antioxiant properties of astaxanthine protects the DNA from degrading as it takes up the free radicals that are produced by unfavorable conditions. We use high light intensities, mainly blue light to stress the algae and about a week later they are completely red. To go back to the zoospores it takes a bit longer. If the conditions get better, i have observed that they can directly divide as a aplanospore

@@ianbcnp I'm looking at a couple of absorption spectra of astaxanthin (admittedly I did not find one in aqueous solution) and it looks like it absorbs heavily in the near UV and well into the greens in the visible spectrum. I think a more conplete explanation of the adaptation is that astaxanthin absorbs most of the more energetic portions of the sunlight falling on the algae, so that it can never be absorbed by chlorophyll, and then reflects the reds and infrareds to remain cool. It's basically acting as a perfectly placed notch filter on the incoming sunlight, only absorbing the parts that would otherwise cause its mitochondria to produce ATP, and reflecting the rest to stay cool. Very cool stuff. (This is all speculation, I have done no research into haematococcus beyond looking at absorption spectra of astaxanthin and watching this video)

@@tissuepaper9962 Thank you for the much more complete and complex explanation. I think I was on the right track but it looks as if it's an amazingly well honed way of dealing with excess light.

you would think! go read about the ginkgo tree's reproduction for some really interesting stuff

The male gametes that moss produce have flagella. It is essential for them to swim through the moisture and reach the female gametes. The same can be applied to ferns. These cells are photosynthetic rather than heterotrophic ( or “animal-like” as you say).

Afaik they did, as some algae are single-celled plants. The first single-celled plants probably originated from a cyanobacterium entering a eucariotic cell and somehow forming a new organism this way. So you could basically say that plants evolved from both animals and bacteria. If you want to know more, look up the chloroplast wikipedia page.

Well it can be yes and no as it depends on what "algae" you are referring to since algae as a whole if not distinguishing beyond that is paraphyletic. Plants are descended from green algae which adapted to life on land via a partnership with fungi and all green algae share a common ancestor that was a green algae. However their sister group the red algae while closely related likely obtained their chloroplasts independently as there are a few intermediate relatives which are true heterotrophs. Its hard to say exactly how they are related since the split between red and green algae occurred well over a billion years ago in the mesoproterozoic. Other linages of algae are far younger for instance the brown algae or kelp lineage only appeared during the Jurassic

I did see that in one of these. So cool!

Those are bacteria cells.

Those are most likely bacteria. Bacteria are prokaryotic cells, meaning they lack membrane-bound organelles and nuclear envelopes. All bacteria are quite small compared to eukaryotic cells such as the haematococcus.

Haema comes from the greek word αίμα, or aíma in latin alphabet which translates to blood. As explained in the video, the algae of course have no blood (Or any circulatory system whatsoever), but nevertheless can be similarly colored. Red would be κόκκινο, or kókkivo.

Perform an experiment and find out.