We recorded something very weird. Something amazing. Something that absolutely blew our minds. And so we’re making a video that is different
for us. And the fact that it happens over the course
of 20 minutes is absolutely astonishing, it is a very brief amount of time. But it also means that we have made the possibly
incorrect decision of sharing it with you unedited and in real time. It’s just so cool that we couldn’t bring
ourselves to edit it. We didn’t want to speed it up. We wanted it to take its course over the amount
of time that it took in the real world. But of course, we also don’t have enough
to say to fill up 20 minutes of video...so the narration will be coming in and out as
the...event...progresses. If you don’t have a full 20 minutes to watch
it, we have put the time codes of those narrations in the description. You can click on them and go to the moment
in the video where I will be talking about what’s happening. So, to begin...Daphnia are a type of crustacean. They’re known for the way they seem to jump
while they swim. And one day, about a year ago—coming from
a cold pond in winter—a daphnia laid an egg that eventually made its way under our
microscope, that large, dark oval you see there taking up the upper left corner of the
screen, that is the Daphnia egg. But we’re not really going to talk about
Daphnia today because, as previously mentioned...things got weird. At the bottom corner there, you can see that
the egg is...leaking? If you know nothing about the reproductive
habits of water fleas, and it’s totally understandable if you don’t, there’s a
sense of order to that movement that might make it seem innocuous, a slow movement from
one oval to another as the leaking substance becomes enveloped in a membrane. It looks, at least, intentional. But James, our master of microscopes, has
spent hours every day looking at the samples he collects. And when he saw this, he knew something very
strange was going on—he just didn’t know what. So, he did the obvious thing and hit record. So...watch with us… Ok, is it done? Did it do the thing? There is something vaguely intestinal about
what we’re watching here like the egg is evacuating a part of it- Oh...no...there’s
more. It’s still coming. Ok, this is it. That is the last bit of whatever the goop
was. It has transferred itself out of the egg and
into this...brown blobby thing. Ok, over the last few minutes, our misshapen
blob took on a more definite, spherical shape. Also, whatever came out of the daphnia egg
appears to be well and truly alive. And as James changes focus, we can see that
this larger sphere appears to contain not just goop, but smaller spheres bound together
by that enclosing membrane. They’re giggling...they’re moving...they're
alive...they are cells. Now this started to seem like something we
might understand...this egg, it seems, was infected with something...and that something
had succeeded. It was an intruder that--having got what it
needed from its host--was moving on to the next phase of its life cycle. And while the bulk of this image might consist
of the Daphnia egg, what we’re actually watching—the leaking, the cell-forming,
the swimming—is the reproduction of a parasite. It took months of searching, but we later
learned that this parasitic species is some type of oomycete, which, if you know your
science greek, you’ll recognize as a “egg fungus.” Now, it’s actually not a fungi, but it does
behave like a fungus in many ways. And oomycetes are responsible for some of
the most harmful plant pathogens, including the one responsible for much of the Irish
potato famine. They’re most closely related to algae, but
they aren’t really very closely related to anything. And the cells inside the membrane are zoospores,
they have flagella and the membrane is called the sporangium. But the oomycete is still not done here, and
the strangest part is yet to come. In its own creeping way, the bundle here looks
like it’s expanding, as the zoospores inside swim more freely and energetically, they collide
against each other, taking up more and more space like a gas heating up. Eventually, we imagine, they’re gonna take
up so much space that the sporangium will rip apart, but not yet. Now, the pack of zoospores is getting bigger—their
movements look almost frantic, pushing and pushing against the sporangium. They are waving their flagella, triggered
by some stimulus, bouncing off of each other, straining the membrane. The Sporangium is getting larger and larger,
and then one zoospore breaks away….the membrane, though invisible, has now definitely broken,
and it peels back and all of its zoospore friends begin to follow...each of them searching
for a new host...each with the potential of starting this whole process all over again,
to the definite detriment of the next generation of daphnia. That was wild. Of course we wish we could have captured more
of the beginning of this process...but from the completion of the evacuation from the
egg to release of the sporangium was less than 20 minutes in real time. It’s hard to be on the side of these little
parasites, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t fascinating! Thank you for coming on this journey with
us as we explore the unseen world that surrounds us. Sometimes, apparently, we’re gonna do it
in slightly different ways. We’re gonna let what happens on the other
end of the microscope dictate what we do here on this channel, and we hope you are ok with
that. If you are, you are welcome to join the community
of people who helps us make these videos, including all of the names that are on this
screen right now. Thank you for joining our Patreon. If you want to see more from our Master of
Microscopes James, check out Jam and Germs on Instagram. And if you want to see more of what we’re
up to, there’s always a subscribe button somewhere nearby.
