In article <CtIHFq.9vy at zoo.toronto.edu>,
Mark Siddall <mes at zoo.toronto.edu> wrote:
>I have a colleague here at VIMS who is curious about osmoregulation
>in protists; in particular marine protists, and naked dinoflagellates
>Any followup posts to bionet.protista will be forwarded to her by me.
I would be interested to see what response this gets. As far as I am
aware from the work I have done on Bonamia (a single cell
?Ascetosporan?) there is no attempt at osmoregulation, the cell is
isotonic with seawater. Indeed Seawater makes an ideal buffer for
fixatives.
I suspect that the spore forming Ascetosporans (such as
Minchinia, Haplosporidium) which tend to be estuarine, unlike
Bonamia, require their spore stage to avoid salinity changes associated
with freshes and floods which would otherwise kill naked infective
stages in the environment.
Brian Jones
