Euglena green is a plant or an animal?

Euglena green is a unicellular animal found in fresh, stagnant reservoirs, marshes, ditches, puddles. The color of this organism is due to the content of a large number of chloroplasts in the cytoplasm. Therefore, it seems that the water "blooms", when it is excessively bred euglena green.

Its structure is a bit more complicated, if you compare it with an amoeba. Both have protoplasm and a nucleus. However, euglena green outside is still covered with a layer of pellicle - an elastic membrane. The body has a shape resembling a spindle, blunt at one end and elongated - from the other. A small flagellum emerges from the depression at the anterior margin. There is also a bright red "eye" that reacts to light and thereby helps the cell to choose the direction of movement. Next to it is the vacuole. Due to the densified outer shell, the shape of the animal does not change significantly, it can only contract, slightly, within certain limits, and straighten. This structure euglena green determines the way of moving. Flanking rotational movements, this microscopic creature swims fairly quickly. There are varieties that make the body wave-like vibrations and thus float. Why this happens is not yet clear. Biologists have two assumptions about this. On the one hand, there may be a connection between the euglena organelles and the protein strands that are under the pellicle and can contract. And on the other hand, this type of movement can be caused by the mucus secreted by the cell.

Eulgene can eat green both as an animal and as a plant. The way she chooses depends on the lighting. In its protoplasm contains more than twenty oval bodies - a chromatophor. They, as already mentioned, and color the cage in green. In the afternoon, using chlorophyll contained in chromatophores, euglena green is able to participate in photosynthesis, assimilating the carbon it needs as well as plants - from carbon dioxide. In this case , a nutrient is formed in its body from inorganic substances , resembling starch and deposited in the form of grains in the cytoplasm. At night, this cell can be fed in the same way as an animal. It is able, with the help of vacuoles, to immediately process organic substances, which in water bodies are abundant in already dissolved form. So does the amoeba. And the more neglected the pond, the more of these substances. If euglena green is in the dark for a long time, chlorophyll from the chromatograph disappears. Accordingly, the color disappears from the cell, it completely discolores.

There are species that are generally not photosynthetic, they can only eat as animals. They even develop a peculiar oral device for swallowing microscopic food particles.

The possibility of a choice by this organism of the method of nutrition once again indicates to scientists that animals and plants have one origin.

Euglena multiplies by the longitudinal division of the cell itself: after the protoplasm it decomposes into two halves and a nucleus. Each new individual grows a new flagella. Under favorable conditions, green euglena is bred so much that the water also becomes a corresponding color. There are such species of these unicellular organisms that, when evolving, have remarkably adapted to live even in frost. As a result of such adaptation during the time of their mass reproduction, snow is colored not only in green, but also in red, yellow and even blue.

Also there are euglens, the cells of which are saturated with carotene. They paint the ponds in red or brown color. When rivers, puddles, marshes, etc., dry up or freeze, euglena green loses flagellum, rounds, becomes covered with a thick shell - temporarily transformed into cyst. In this form, it can wait for favorable conditions in the same place or be carried along with dust.