Question

A student identified a wet-mount slide of a microorganism from a pond water sample as a protist. Which observable characteristic would lead to the student's conclusion?

Answer 1

Presence of both organelles characteristic of both plant & animal cells (e.g. chloroplasts and flagella, etc). Of course, a more accurate description would be to analyse the nanoscopic structure of the individual structures &/or to read the individual DNA & perform a cladistic analysis.