Remanella microstoma (Dragesco, 1954b) Foissner, 1996

From the Intertidal benthos of marine estuarine bay Acabonac Harbor . They are quite abundant and range in length from 80 to 110 microns with a flattened cytosome, a parrots beak- like anterior which I saw one use like a can opener to pry at a potential meal, and a pointed angular bent tail. In my pictures you can clearly see the single anterior Muller vesicle and the two round macronuclei. The following descriptions are from (2): "Remanella microstoma (Dragesco, 1954b) Foissner, 1996 . The original description was “140 um long, beak and buccal field small and inconspicuous, no cortical granules. . .” (Dragesco 1954b). According to the original illustration, the most significant features of this organism are: (1) buccal field about 15% of body length; (2) a distinct, narrow tail that is almost 25% of body length; (3) single Müller vesicle.

The well-known karyorelictid ciliate genus Remanella Foissner, 1996 is widely accepted to be a clearly-outlined taxon (Dragesco 1960; Foissner 1996; Lynn 2008; Xu et al. 2012). Although Remanella shares almost the same infraciliature with Loxodes, it differs from the latter by living in marine habitats, and by having a tail-like posterior body portion, organic spicules forming a cytoplasmic skeleton, cnidocyst-like extrusomes, and Müller vesicles containing a single, or only a few, granules (Foissner 1996). There are, currently, 19 nominal species assigned to this genus.

Imaged in Nomarski DIC using Olympus BH2S under SPlan 40x and 20x objectives plus phone cropping".

1. Diversity of the karyorelictid ciliates: Remanella (Protozoa, Ciliophora, Karyorelictida) inhabiting intertidal areas of Qingdao, China, with descriptions of three species
   Yuan Xu, Miao Miao, Alan Warren, Weibo Song. Systematics and Biodiversity (2012), 10(2): 207–219 https://doi.org/10.1080/14772000.2012.681713

2. Phylogeny and systematic revision of the karyorelictid genus Remanella (Ciliophora, Karyorelictea) with descriptions of two new species. Yuan Xu, Shan Gao,∗, Xiaozhong Hu, Khaled A.S. Al-Rasheid, Weibo Song. February 2013 European Journal of Protistology 49(3)