Foraging trade-offs, flagellar arrangements, and flow architecture of planktonic protists.

ABSTRACT: Unicellular flagellated protists are a key element in aquatic microbial food webs. They all use flagella to swim and to generate feeding currents to encounter prey and enhance nutrient uptake. At the same time, the beating flagella create flow disturbances that attract flow-sensing predators. Protists have highly diverse flagellar arrangements in terms of number of flagella and their position, beat pattern, and kinematics, but it is unclear how the various arrangements optimize the fundamental trade-off between resource acquisition and predation risk. Here we describe the near-cell flow fields produced by 15 species and demonstrate consistent relationships between flagellar arrangement and swimming speed and between flagellar arrangement and flow architecture, and a trade-off between resou

SUBMITTER: Nielsen LT 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7826366 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature