Danish researchers have discovered a mysterious creature that is neither animal or plant.

Nice find!
Reminds me of corals or upside down jellyfish (Cassiopeia): animals with zooxanthella in their tissue that provide them with glucose and oxygen from the photosynthesis process. Its symbioses cause the algae use the CO2 and other waste from the provider.
Nature is so beautiful its unreal.

Is it a mushroom then? they also are a mix of both...

Originally posted by Qumulys
Hmmm. Genuinely interesting!

But, where do Venus Fly Traps fit in? Don't they do this?

No, Venus Fly Traps are always a plant and doesn't move like they claim this thing does and it says it morphs into either a plant or animal where the Venus Fly Trap just eats bugs as well as pulls nutrients out of the soil as well as the Sunlight.
Very strange indeed, but doesn't it relate to a "couch potato" ?

I KNEW IT! pokémons were real!!!!
Now I can rest in peace

btw, great find, it's awesome that every time humanity thinks that everything was settled, something happens and everything we believed we knew now is uncertain... like those particles travelling faster than light and so on. And plantimals/plant type pokémon.

Quite amazing. Life really does adapt to anything.

Originally posted by Indellkoffer

Originally posted by Chewingonmushrooms
Isn't fungi on a class on it's own as well? I know it isn't classified in the plant kingdom. Any mycellum experts here?

Fungi are a separate kingdom. There are five kingdoms of living things: Monera Kingdom, the Protist Kingdom, the Fungi Kingdom, the Plant Kingdom, and the Animal Kingdom. It's too complex for Monera, and too many cells (I think) for Protist. Will they start a new kingdom? That's a pretty difficult decision -- they first have to find out exactly where it fits in the web of life.

Actually Mesodinium chamaeleon belongs to the ciliate and thus also to the protozoans. Depending on which classification system you use this species is either an animal (classical system), an eukaryote (Three-domain system) or a protist (if you use the 5 kingdom-classification-system). .
en.wikipedia.org...

Many species of ciliates and other protists are mixotrophic. This means, they can use both photosynthesis and heterotrophically nourishment (feeding from the substance of other organisms) as energy source. Other examples are Euglena and various dinoflagellates.

Some higher animals like sea slugs, corals and flatworms also add photosynthesis to their normal heterotrophic nourishment. They use single-cell algae as endosymbionts. These endosymbionts are called zooxanthellae.

It is not uncommon for a single-celled organism to switch between different feeding methods. Often such a switch is linked to different stages of its life-cycle. If I understood the article correctly, the novelty seems to be, that Mesodinium chamaeleon first devoures other single-celled organisms (algae). The algae are dissolved in its food vacuole. But not the whole algae are digested. The chloroplasts (organelles which are responsible for the photosynthesis) and some other structures remain intact in the food-vacuole and from then on provide energy for Mesodinium chamaeleon .

English link
www.newscientist.com...

Studies on the Genus Mesodinium I: Ultrastructure and Description of Mesodinium chamaeleon n. sp., a Benthic Marine Species with Green or Red Chloroplasts by Øjvind Moestrup1, Lydia Garcia-Cuetos, Per Juel Hansen, Tom Fenchel

We provide here the description of a new marine species that harbors green or red chloroplasts. In contrast to certain other species of the genus, Mesodinium chamaeleon n. sp. can be maintained in culture for short periods only. It captures and ingests flagellates including cryptomonads. The prey is ingested very rapidly into a food vacuole without the cryptomonad flagella being shed and the trichocysts being discharged. The individual food vacuoles subsequently serve as photosynthetic units, each containing the cryptomonad chloroplast, a nucleus, and some mitochondria. The ingested cells are eventually digested. This type of symbiosis differs from other plastid-bearing Mesodinium spp. in retaining ingested cryptomonad cells almost intact. The food strategy of the new species appears to be intermediate between heterotrophic species, such as Mesodinium pulex and Mesodinium pupula, and species with red cryptomonad endosymbionts, such as Mesodinium rubrum.

onlinelibrary.wiley.com...

Originally posted by VelvetSplash
Quite amazing. Life really does adapt to anything.

Yup, this could convince scientist that planets with turbulent conditions for life MIGHT just have life...

Originally posted by marinesniper0351
reply to post by Char-Lee

 

Agreed wont start but come on what kind of life is it to be a vegan(a)... : ) j/k no red meat, no fish, I can already feel my bones breaking and my stomach growling...

Seriously though, I have a friend that supplements his vegan diet to keep his bones and limbs strong, he told me when he did not do this that he became quite weak and used to fracture bones and get hurt a lot...

but damn he had some smokin hot vegan female friends...

they are like a cult (in a good way)

Could be he would have had those problems anyway right.
My favorite food many years ago was BBQ Steak with a lot of fat on it...juice to me now translates body fluids. Body fats, well think of your own ugh! Lol

I LOVE the way we eat now and it has become natural to us, and yes it is hard to watch people eat blood and gore and the smell of it is nauseating to you avoid meet eaters more.

We started because of the horrendous treatment of animals that we just debase to calling "meat". But my husband had high blood pressure and high cholesterol at age 40!
Health benefits and a very fun experimenting with new recipes and spices have become our way of life. Finding things that are healthy and taste good is not hard like I had thought it would be! You get used to it very quickly and wonder why you did not start earlier. We use a Vit B supplement but most people take vitamins vegetarian or not.

Interesting the studies where they feed the rats starvation diets and they get healthy and live longer...I think money making product pushers are wanting us to eat eat eat and think we will starve or have tiny shrunken brains if we skip their beef lol!!!

Here are some studies you may find interesting.
www.vivausa.org...

It could possibly be the evolved form of something, especially with all of the rapid changes to earth.

reply to post by Mianeye


A more advanced version of these will be ruling the world in 1,000 years after humans are the extinct and the next fossil fuel!

Great find OP, S+F from me!

Some really astounding things happening in the ocean, to think we've probably only scratched the surface of what happens there. All the more reason to protect our aquatic friends from...us!

reply to post by nineix


I remember reading, a long time ago, an article about these rare individuals that lived for years with nothing to eat but basically air and water.

The article also spoke of a nun that lived for years eating nothing but the communion wafer. I have my doubts but who really knows?

reply to post by Mianeye


David Wilcock's New book the source field investigation has a similar example, and lots of other amazing scientific facts. Read it, and you'll have a more open mind and wider consciousness.

2012 is just seeming more and more plausible the more weird threads I see pop up everyday.

reply to post by Mianeye
Great find OP! Nature is a great thing. Such a unique survival method. Now how long will it be before a lab reverse engineers it so they can at it to corn fields....can't wait to see that corn chasing the cows All kidding aside it could provide a unique opportunity to study learn form one of the more "out there" creatures on our planet.
Regards,
RogueTraveller

If it isen't big enough to see with the eyes real good, then it's not a real animal (or plant), just a MIKRO-ORGANISM.
This species only exist in denamrk?

Originally posted by 1ness
reply to post by Mianeye

 

David Wilcock's New book the source field investigation has a similar example, and lots of other amazing scientific facts. Read it, and you'll have a more open mind and wider consciousness.

And a lighter wallet and a lot of responsible, sane people wanting to know why in the world you would support a known fraud.

Originally posted by SavedOne
reply to post by Mianeye

 

Fascinating!! This is what happens when we try to subdivide things and stick them into neat little boxes, something comes along that blows all our preconceptions to smithereens

Yep.. and Science is forever trying to classify everything in this manner. That's a Big Flaw in science itself it seems. I believe this is why science is thwarted and leads to close mindedness. We need a total redefining of the principles of science as to better allow for discoveries that don't fit the conventional norms. Science is really a philosophy but it's philosophy is very primitive and obtuse.

There are nudibranchs (sea slugs) that can eat algae, put the algae in their tissue, and use it to photosynthesize so that they don't need to eat. Same basic mechanism, so this doesn't seem completely new.

www.wired.com...

Shaped like a leaf itself, the slug Elysia chlorotica already has a reputation for kidnapping the photosynthesizing organelles and some genes from algae. Now it turns out that the slug has acquired enough stolen goods to make an entire plant chemical-making pathway work inside an animal body, says Sidney K. Pierce of the University of South Florida in Tampa.

The slugs can manufacture the most common form of chlorophyll, the green pigment in plants that captures energy from sunlight, Pierce reported January 7 at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology. Pierce used a radioactive tracer to show that the slugs were making the pigment, called chlorophyll a, themselves and not simply relying on chlorophyll reserves stolen from the algae the slugs dine on.

“This could be a fusion of a plant and an animal — that’s just cool,” said invertebrate zoologist John Zardus of The Citadel in Charleston, S.C.

Originally posted by Dynamitrios
Is it a mushroom then? they also are a mix of both...

No they are not.