''Volvox globator'' is a species of green algae of the genus ''

Volvox ''Volvox'' is a polyphyletic genus of chlorophyte green algae in the family Volvocaceae. It forms spherical colonies of up to 50,000 cells. They live in a variety of freshwater habitats, and were first reported by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek in 1700 ...

''. It was originally described by

Carl Linnaeus Carl Linnaeus (; 23 May 1707 – 10 January 1778), also known after his ennoblement in 1761 as Carl von Linné Blunt (2004), p. 171. (), was a Swedish botanist, zoologist, taxonomist, and physician who formalised binomial nomenclature, the ...

in his 1758 work ''

Systema Naturae ' (originally in Latin written ' with the ligature æ) is one of the major works of the Swedish botanist, zoologist and physician Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) and introduced the Linnaean taxonomy. Although the system, now known as binomial nomen ...

''. In 1856 its sexuality was described by

Ferdinand Cohn Ferdinand Julius Cohn (24 January 1828 – 25 June 1898) was a German biologist. He is one of the founders of modern bacteriology and microbiology. Ferdinand J. Cohn was born in the Jewish quarter of Breslau in the Kingdom of Prussia, Prussia ...

and is the same as '' Sphaeroplea'' ''annulina''.http://www.pnf.org/compendium/Ferdinand_Julius_Cohn.pdf It is colonial flagellate found in freshwaters. The colony consists of thousands of zooids (somatic cells) arranged in a single peripheral layer. each zooids shows two flagella, two or more contractile vacuoles, cup like chloroplast, a single nucleus, a red stigma but no gullet. Nutrition is holophytic. Size of colony increases by binary fission. In the colony the zooids called parthenogonidia repeatedly divide to form daughter colonies which are released from parent colony.

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