Protists form the foundation of aquatic food webs and drive global nutrient cycles, yet distinguishing which species photosynthesize, graze or do both remains a major challenge because most are uncultivable and community surveys seldom resolve species‐level traits. We developed a field grazing‐scPCR framework that integrates short‐term grazing assays, single‐cell microscopy and 18S rRNA sequencing to link morphology, fluoresce...

The interactions between symbiotic bacterial consortia and their protist hosts in benthic environments have attracted increasing interest in recent years. In the present study, we investigated the diversity of potentially associated bacteria for an astomatous ciliate, Kentrophoros flavus , collected in the intertidal zone of Yantai, China. For the first time, the diversity of the associated bacteria in the species K. flavus wa...