“Very exciting” microscopic find in Kamloops pond sparks partnership with Russian researcher

A Merritt resident’s recent microscopic discovery in a Kamloops pond caught the attention of a Russian researcher and the pair are putting together a scientific paper on it for publication.

Bailey Duncan is a nature enthusiast who loves photographing various species across the animal kingdom, and since moving to Merritt from Florida 18 months ago, his photo collection has reached almost 1,100 species.

This spring he expanded his hobby into finding microscopic organisms.

“I finished documenting most of the birds and flowers around May and thought, ‘what new species can I keep finding?’” he said. “I’ll need a microscope for this.”

After purchasing an old German model of microscope off Facebook Marketplace, Duncan spent the summer taking water samples out of ponds in the region and studying them.

It was in October when he found something unusual in a sample from a pond on the Thompson Plateau in Kamloops. One-celled organisms called suctorians were attaching themselves to unlikely hosts.

“Suctorians are a type of ciliate which is a microscopic one-celled organism that propels itself through water with tiny hairs and attaches to a host,” Duncan explained.

“Ciliates as a branch are very common in all water bodies around the globe. Suctorians are a more rare, understudied type of them. This is the first time I found suctorians.”

The suctorians Duncan found in the pond were attaching to water fleas, which is something they don’t typically do.

He collected 50 water fleas and found suctorians attached to 48 of them. After posting his findings to iNaturalist on Oct. 4, he got a response from a head researcher of suctorians in Russia, Илья Монашев, or Ilya Monashev.

“These are very understudied organisms,” Duncan said. “There are only a thousand posts on iNaturalist of the entire order and Monashev made like 800 of them. He’s the only person pioneering into it.

“He said the species is not new but the occurrence on this type of host is highly unusual. He was like, ‘this is so exciting,’ and I was like, ‘I need to go back to that pond immediately.’”

Duncan is continuing to collect samples in hopes of finding out why there are so many suctorians in the pond, what they are eating and whether the cold kills them.

In the meantime, Monashev is communicating with Duncan via email and putting together a research paper with a focus on the ecology of the species.

“He is doing most of the manuscript work on the article and I’m providing the data,” Duncan said. “We’ll have the paper done by the end of the year and then we’ll start looking for publishers.”

He recently confirmed a meeting with a professor at Thompson Rivers University to genetically test the suctorians to see if it’s a new species.

“It’s very exciting, it’s like a dream,” he said. “I’m not a professional and I found something that might be new. It’s cool because not many people know much about microscopic species.”

The exact location of the pond will be kept vague until the study is completed and the paper is published.

Go here to check out a vast collection of Duncan’s documented animal species.