ИСТИНА

The report deals with little-known and also unknown phenomena related to the morphology of testate amoebae observed in two dimensional scales. The well-known concept of photonic crystals in a nanoscale dimension is applicable for a wide range of living organisms from diatoms to butterflies. To a much lesser extent this phenomenon is known in testate amoebae. For the first time our information about the properties of nanostructural organization of shell amoebae was reported in 2010 at the conference of the International Society of Evolutionary Protistology (Kanazawa, Japan). Our hypothesis concerned the importance of photonic crystals in the evolution of the shell. The reason for it was the fact that the organic matrix (the basis of a shell) has the structure of a photonic crystal with regard to hydrobiont species, primarily from the genera Arcella and Pyxidicula. There are well-known and hitherto studied – radially symmetric and two-apertural testate amoebae, such as Archerella flavum with 6 planes of symmetry. But till recently the bilaterally symmetric testate amoebae with two appertures were unknown. The present study showed that such testate amoebae belong to the genus Wailesella. One of it’s apertures is on the ventral side, while the second, more small, aperture is on the dorsal side. Sometimes it is closed with a small plug. These testate amoebae were found in Sphagnum samples from two geographical regions – from the Russian sub-Arctic and from one of the islands of the Japanese archipelago. These amoebae were registered both in the populations of typical Wailesella (which are characterized by a single aperture) and also in a separate population with two apertures. The bilateral and two-apertural testate amoebae were discovered in the ecologically clean region of the protected status. So this fact serves as the basis for the hypothesis that it is not a teratogenous fenomenon, and, presumably, manifests some kind of a new evolutionary and ecological strategy of testate amoebae. This phenomenon is also observed among testate amoebae belonging to the genus Cryptodifflugia.