There algae fraudsters

Cheating - feature of behavior, characteristic of species such as a human or chimpanzee. But our planet, there are single-celled algae, also capable to resort to deception.

Algae species Prymnesium parvum - Haptophyte and is one of the main culprits of blooms each year polluting water bodies in all parts of the world. Together with diatoms, they make up a large part of the biomass of the planet. Mostly they live in the sea, but in recent times the representatives of this type have been seen in freshwater lakes.

A feature Prymnesium parvum is a toxin - suggesting that algae use it to suppress the livelihoods of food competitors ever diatoms. However, not all produce the toxin representatives Prymnesium parvum - some of them just enjoy the fact that the neighbors made.

It would seem that such parasite must grow faster, but it was not so easy. To find out why this happens, an experiment was conducted: some cultures Prymnesium parvum isolated, divided into toxic and netochksichnyh and subjected to careful observation. The result was that the algae produce toxins, drastically change their behavior.

Once in the water a lot of nutrients, algae actively developed through photosynthesis. However, if the environment is poor in nutrients, some of them become generators toxin. These toxic simple, using a pair of flagella, are beginning to behave more actively, effectively becoming a hunter, and start to attack other species by eating them and eliminating netochksichnyh neighbors from the competition. The secret of this behavior lies in the DNA of the simplest, where the chain found responsible for such social behavior.

Thus, individual cells still drifting along with the whole cell mass, no matter whether they produce toxin or not. The toxin is only necessary in the case of a large population of cells. But when there are algae-end competitors, the latter-day hunters are taken as their own brothers, who wanted them to profit at their expense.

via factroom.ru