Fig. 12. Effect of bacterial size on edibility. The growth rates (days^-1) of wild-type worms and three different feeding-defective mutants on 14 different bacterial strains. The bacteria are listed in order of decreasing eat-2 growth rate. Above are photographs of each of the bacterial strains as they appear when isolated from lawns on nematode growth medium. The scale bar applies to all pictures. In addition, 0.8 µm blue-dyed latex beads were mixed in with the bacteria as an internal size standard. These are identified by black dots. A strong although not perfect inverse correlation between growth rate and bacterial size is obvious. B7, Pseudomonas sp.; H39, Comamonas sp.; W11, Pseudomonas sp.; H10, Unidentified; H-12, Acinetobacter junii; H26, Pantoea sp.; HB101, Escherichia coli; H25, Acinetobacter sp.; H28, Bacillus simplex; S4, Panteoa dispersa; S3, Bacillus licheniformis; DA837, Escherichia coli; S9, Bacillus sp.; S13, Bacillus cereus; L10, Bacillus megaterium.

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