Vampyrella is a genus of amoebae belonging to the vampyrellid endomyxans usually ranging from 30-60 μm. Members of the genus alternate between two life stages: a free-living trophozoite stage and a cyst stage in which mitosis occurs. This taxon has received a great deal of attention due to their peculiar feeding behaviour of perforating the cell wall of algal cells and drawing out the contents for nourishment.
Vampyrella is a genus of amoebae belonging to the vampyrellid endomyxans usually ranging from 30-60 μm. Members of the genus alternate between two life stages: a free-living trophozoite stage and a cyst stage in which mitosis occurs. This taxon has received a great deal of attention due to their peculiar feeding behaviour of perforating the cell wall of algal cells and drawing out the contents for nourishment.
== History == Vampire amoebae were first discovered in 1865 by Leon Cienkowski. These amoebae were given the genus name Vampyrella due to their bright red colouration and their distinct feeding habits in which they perforate the cell wall of their host and draw out the inner contents of the cell, resembling that of folklore vampires.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).