MicrobeHunter.com Microscopy Forum

Wonderful video. Those guys are not so easy to photograph with their frequent jumps and general zipping around.

This is what can happen if you add a couple of tiny pieces of raw chicken to some pond water. The population takes 3-6 days to 'bloom.' The video has segments at three different magnifications. https://youtu.be/G7craoGXN1g I've tried this with several different water samples, and the results were di...

You are really smart to be keeping careful records of your explorations. You’ve got a good start on a system. It will probably evolve over time as the diversity of your experiences grows. I deeply regret that I didn’t keep detailed records like you’re doing. As I’ve accumulated more and more images,...

Chas - Just sent you a PM.

Wow - that is very cool! What a great idea! It's fascinating to watch the cilia in slow motion. We used to use the old General Radio strobes that have variable rates and extremely short flashes to study insect wing motion in an undergraduate lab course. As with your Vorticella , the strobes provided...

Interesting comments about the bird baths. This summer I found a collecting site that had the most interesting diversity of protozoans and rotifers I've ever encountered. It was a short stretch of lake shoreline distinguished by small, fluffy bird feathers on or near the water. Samples with no evide...

Very cool. I once saw the same strange, cosmic phenomenon. It's amazing how quickly the diameter increases - quite clear in the video. I've more frequently seen high bacterial densities form in straight lines, like rivers. Protozoa have occasionally formed lines of high density as well. Does anyone ...

Thank you all for your kind comments. Michael - that website is a huge help. And not just for rotifers. Quite amazing photos throughout. The work he's put in to provide such extensive and useful information to accompany the photos is impressive. xioz - thanks for the nice video. I'm pretty sure that...

I just noticed that WojTek posted a very nice, very interesting video of a rotifer shortly before I put up these pictures. That video helps, too, because the more familiar rotifer body shape of its subject shows the great contrast with the unusual body of Microcodon . Thanks for sharing your video, ...

One collection site this summer was especially rich in micro-creatures. These two rotifers, in particular, caught my eye: The first photo is Monommata sp. which was quite common. Very graceful and calm usually, but capable of sudden, violent jumps. Oddly, the left toe was longer than the right in ev...

Could this be part of the explanation?

https://www.microbehunter.com/microscop ... 30&t=16399

Impressive! Wonderful view of the vibrating membrane.

Yes, both sources provide light at the same time. I normally reduce the constant source to a low level when taking the flash shot. The flash is very much brighter than the halogen source, so the halogen has no detectable effect on the images. The goal was to make the optics of the flash pathway as s...

Just posted the information of the flash over in Illumination Techniques.

Bruce - Thanks very much for the information. Let me check to see if there are more photos of the mystery creature (but probably not - it was a brief encounter).

Some folks asked about the flash setup I used for the photos in the ‘Slender ciliates’ post over in Pictures and Videos. The core of the system is a Profoto D2 studio flash. It’s almost seven pounds and awkwardly big. However, the high light output, short flash durations, and several other features ...

Fascinating video. Especially interesting toward the end where you can clearly see the tentacles holding the suctorians to the Paramecium. Could you possibly give a bit of a play-by-play? How did the suctorian(s) attach to the fast-moving Paramecium in the first place? Did the attack start with just...

RichardK-M: I also use Photoshop to put scale bars on photos using the same basic logic you do. An alternative procedure that's efficient: 1) convert distance on the photos of the stage micrometer to pixels using the Ruler tool (go to Analyze under the Image pull-down). 2) Then you can create a pres...

Thank you all for your kind comments - much appreciated! Responding to the questions: Dennis - the samples were from the north shore of Lake Redington in Patuxet Wildlife Refuge near Bowie, MD. Some shore birds hang out there, which might explain the high numbers and diversity of microorganisms. (I'...

Just a few ciliates that have turned up in water samples over the last couple of months. My IDs are very tentative, so any help with them would be much appreciated. #1. Loxodes sp. - not common in these samples; flattened body; relatively slow-moving Loxodes copy.jpg #2. Monilicaryon or Pseudomonili...

Thank you all for your comments. They stimulated me to do some more digging on the question of chemical signals and signal detection. Most of the research is on Dictyostelium (slime mold), a 'social' amoeba that uses chemical signals extensively. That's a special case, however. A few papers dealt wi...

What a great technique - creative, simple, effective. Would a syringe work for drawing off the water? You can get blunt-tip needles, although regular sharp-tipped might work even better. Maybe something like this: https://www.amazon.com/Industrial-Syringes-Blunt-Needle-Plastic/dp/B07TJGK3GH/ref=sr_1...

Several times I've seen amoeba change course, apparently to go to a potential meal. Are amoeba able to detect prey/food without actually coming in contact with it? Here is an example: I was photographing the pretty gold amoeba (a flamellid?) when a large (100-200 µm), dark, spindly amoeba appeared s...

Javier makes good points. The condenser aperture is much too small. In addition, the condenser is not focused properly. One clue is the uneven lighting Javier mentioned. Another is in the background 'dots' that don't move when you move the slide. They are probably dust on the condenser lens. This li...

For anyone who hasn't run across it already, the site iBiology.org (https://www.ibiology.org) has a whole series of videos on microscopy that are very helpful and enjoyable. The topics cover everything from the history of microscopy through the optics through specialized techniques. The technical le...

Just to mention that you can find basic measuring and scale bar creation in Photoshop (at least Photoshop22 for Mac). The last item on the Image pull-down is Analysis. There you can enter and store distance-to-pixel calibrations from photos of a stage micrometer as others have described, use the cal...