Moving without limbs! Linnaeus on Volvox

 

Linnaeus - 1758

In ancient times, when dusky seaside sparrows still roamed the Earth, I took two years of high school Latin. My Latin name was Matteus (we were all required to call each other and Mrs. Knowles by our Latin names); my Latin motto was “carpe diem.” That’s about how much I remember. Thankfully, in these modern times, we have Google Translate*. If you remember more Latin than I do, please feel free to correct my translations in the comments.

Linnaeus gave Van Leeuwehoek’s “great round particles” the name Volvox in his Systema Naturae. Linnaeus lists two species of “Volvox“, V. globator and V. chaos. “Volvox chaos” is an amoeba now known as Chaos sp. (though there is some confusion about its exact identity). Although AlgaeBase lists V. chaos as a valid taxon, Leidy (1879, pp. 30-35) reviews the synonymy of Chaos, and it is clearly an amoeba, not an alga.

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Volvox 2015 meeting review available online

Fig. 1 from Herron 2016. Examples of volvocine species. A: Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, B: Gonium pectorale, C: Astrephomene gubernaculiferum, D: Pandorina morum, E: Volvulina compacta, F: Platydorina caudata, G: Yamagishiella unicocca, H: Colemanosphaera charkowiensis, I: Eudorina elegans, J: Pleodorina starrii, K: Volvox barberi, L: Volvox ovalis, M: Volvox gigas, N: Volvox aureus, O: Volvox carteri.

Fig. 1 from Herron 2016. Examples of volvocine species. A: Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, B: Gonium pectorale, C: Astrephomene gubernaculiferum, D: Pandorina morum, E: Volvulina compacta, F: Platydorina caudata, G: Yamagishiella unicocca, H: Colemanosphaera charkowiensis, I: Eudorina elegans, J: Pleodorina starrii, K: Volvox barberi, L: Volvox ovalis, M: Volvox gigas, N: Volvox aureus, O: Volvox carteri. A and B by Deborah Shelton.

The meeting review for the Third International Volvox Conference is now available online at Molecular Ecology (doi: 10.1111/mec.13551). The editors warned me ahead of time that the challenge for this paper would be to make it of broad interest to the readership of Molecular Ecology, so there is a lot of background information that will be old news to members of the Volvox community.

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Volvox T-shirts

Volvox t-shirt, women's

If you need more Volvox-themed clothing (and who doesn’t?), by ribosoma biological designs has you covered. They’re available in long-sleeved or short-sleeved. I don’t know how long these will take to ship from Spain, but if you didn’t get one of the super-cool shirts from the Volvox meeting, now’s your chance!

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Performing the Office of Fins: Henry Baker on Volvox

Figure 27 from Baker 1764.

Figure 27 from Baker 1764.

Gilbert Smith’s foundational comparative study of the then known species of Volvox cites Henry Baker’s 1753 book, Employment for the Microscope : in Two Parts. Although he was writing 50+ years after Van Leeuwenhoek first described his “great round particles” (see “…of the bignefs of a great corn of fand…”), Baker makes no mention of this earlier publication. Since Part II of Employment is titled “An account of various animalcules, never before described, and of many other microscopical discoveries,” it seems that he was unaware of Van Leeuwenhoek’s work [emphasis mine]. Read a Philosophical Transactions for once in your life.*

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Volvox in Wired

Volvox photo by Jack Challoner

Volvox photo by Jack Challoner

Wired has a short blurb featuring some photos from Jack Challoner’s new book The Cell: A Visual Tour of the Building Block of Life, including the above Volvox picture. The caption is

Algae Colonies
Each green sphere is a colony of Volvox algae with more than 50,000 cells. Scientists study these glowing, freshwater organisms as models for how living creatures develop specialized cells and tissue. Strands of cytoplasm connect neighboring cells, allowing them to communicate, and slender flagella propel the colony through the water.

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New Volvox species

Hisayoshi Nozaki and colleagues have done it again: in a new PLoS One article, they have described yet another new species of Volvox, V. reticuliferus (see also “Volvox 2015: taxonomy, phylogeny, & ecology“):

Figure 1A from Nozaki et al. 2015: Surface view of asexual Volvox reticuliferus spheroids.

Figure 1A from Nozaki et al. 2015: Surface view of asexual Volvox reticuliferus spheroids.

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Volvox ovalis

Volvox ovalis

Volvox ovalis, strain NIES-2569.Creative Commons License
Volvox ovalis by Matthew Herron is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Volvox ovalis was described by Hisayoshi Nozaki and Annette Coleman in 2011 from a strain collected near College Station, Texas. Colonies are often distinctly egg-shaped, up to 450 µm long, with 1000-2000 somatic cells and 8-12 gonidia. A member of the section Merrillosphaera, it is closely related to V. tertius and V. spermatosphaera:

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Volvox 2015: taxonomy, phylogeny & ecology

Volvox africanus

Volvox africanus (from Herron et al. 2010)

The worst-kept secret among Volvox researchers is that the current volvocine taxonomy is a train wreck. Within the largest family, the Volvocaceae, five nominal genera are polyphyletic (Pandorina, Volvulina, Eudorina, Pleodorina, and Volvox). Of the remaining three, two are monotypic (Platydorina and Yamagishiella). Only the newly described Colemanosphaera is monophyletic with more than one species. The extent of the problem was suspected long before it was confirmed by molecular phylogenetics, and ad hoc attempts to deal with it have led to the existence of such taxonomic abominations as ‘sections,’ ‘formas,’ and ‘syngens.’ An overhaul is called for, but it is complicated by the aforementioned loss of type cultures.

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