Please help identify some things I am frequently seeing in dirty backyard water

[hans]

These are all from a small plastic tub with water and a handful of dirt, kept in a mostly shady area and topped up with water occasionally, after about a week sitting out. I am in San Diego, CA, a couple miles inland from the coast.

All photos were using the 40X plan achro objective (not sure of part number -- printing is worn off) on a Reichert 410 with a Google Pixel 2 XL (default Android 10 camera app with all default/automatic settings) handheld through the standard 10X W.F. 181 eyepieces. Comments regarding image quality relative to what could be expected with this sort of setup or any signs of a problem or adjustment needed with the microscope would be helpful. I put a link to the full-size original image before each inline attachment.

These are all stationary or slow-moving. I see quite a few paramecium and a lot of even smaller, faster moving things that are hard to get a good look at. Not much luck yet getting photo/video of the faster-moving stuff with my smartphone.

0.jpg full-size original - This is a nematode, I think?

0.jpg (44.47 KiB) Viewed 4946 times

1.jpg full-size original - No idea what this one is.

1.jpg (51.78 KiB) Viewed 4946 times

2.jpg full-size original - I see many fragments of this branching (usually in near-90-degree tees), segmented stuff. I don't think the yellow blob next to it is related, this is just the clearest photo I got.

2.jpg (46.94 KiB) Viewed 4946 times

3.jpg full-size original - Pollen? These are always a pair of joined balls and appear to have a somewhat regular, polyhedral structure that is more obvious looking through the eyepieces than in the photos.

3.jpg (55.87 KiB) Viewed 4946 times

4.jpg full-size original - Not common -- I have only ever seen this one blob of unusually-colorful stuff. The colors in the photo are a reasonably accurate depiction of what it looked like through the eyepieces. I don't think the colors are chromatic aberration.

4.jpg (49.37 KiB) Viewed 4946 times

[75RR]

Comments regarding image quality relative to what could be expected with this sort of setup or any signs of a problem or adjustment needed with the microscope would be helpful.

How do the images compare with what you see though the eyepieces? They do seem a little washed out.

Also a holder for your phone will allow both sharper images (it will be steadier) and free your hands to make adjustments.

[DonSchaeffer]

Looks like you have a worm there. Is it wriggling.
Those little boxy things are blue-green algae.
Is that circular thing (#2) moving?

[Bruce Taylor]

"0" is a nematode...a rather chubby one. "1" is a ciliate, or part of one. We don't see enough detail to attempt a narrower identification, but the appearance of the cytoplasm and the habitat in which you collected the organism suggest a colpodean (e.g. Colpoda). "2" is fungal, I think...spores of an ascomycete beginning to germinate. "3" does look like pollen, to me (but I know nothing at all about pollen, so can't say more). "4" is inanimate...a chunk of debris.

[BramHuntingNematodes]

The last one looks like it may be a chunk of mica, which you might find abundantly in clay soils. They are made of many sheets or lamina of phase shifting material and produce diffractive effects.

[BramHuntingNematodes]

Would need significantly better detail of the head to start trying to ID the nematode,

[micro]

1 might be ophryoglena

[hans]

How do the images compare with what you see though the eyepieces? They do seem a little washed out.

Also a holder for your phone will allow both sharper images (it will be steadier) and free your hands to make adjustments.

The photos are not too far off but overall they definitely do not look as nice as the view through the eyepieces. I find it a bit difficult to pinpoint exactly why.

The resolution is not quite as good, but I'm not sure motion is the problem since the EXIF data shows the camera using 1/300 s or faster shutter speeds. (It just occurred to me that I should have switched out the ND filter when taking photos to further reduce that.) I don't think imprecise focusing or motion between focusing and exposure explains it either because even when focus doesn't end up exactly where I wanted (which is often) there are usually still plenty of objects spanning the focal plane and the best-focused ares of those don't look as sharp as through the eyepieces. The resolution could also just be the limit of the smartphone camera. I have not yet tried to compare carefully with photos of normal scenes.

The washed out look could probably be improved by manually adjusting contrast, I haven't tried that yet. The automatic processing done by the camera app may not work well with the bright white background -- on normal scenes it generally errs toward excessive contrast whereas the photos through the eyepiece may need a bit more.

I also feel like there are some visual cues not captured in a photo that help with the subjective impression of image quality when looking through the eyepieces. For example, out-of focus clutter always seems to be more noticeable and distracting in the photos, perhaps because motion parallax helps the brain ignore it while viewing through the eyepieces?

A holder for the phone would be nice, do you have any specific recommendations? I hadn't looked into them yet because I got a trinocular head a few weeks ago and wanted to experiment with that first.

Looks like you have a worm there. Is it wriggling.

Yes, slowly.

Is that circular thing (#2) moving?

I has been a couple weeks since I took the photos but I don't think anything in #2 was moving.

"1" is a ciliate, or part of one. We don't see enough detail to attempt a narrower identification, but the appearance of the cytoplasm and the habitat in which you collected the organism suggest a colpodean (e.g. Colpoda).

I see on the Wikipedia page: "Colpoda inflata - Possibly one of the best known and most common species, noted for its fitful resting stage in which it jerks around in a tight circle, frustrating microscopists trying to photograph it live." Sounds exactly right, this particular one wasn't moving much, maybe unhealthy, but similar-looking ones were doing the tight circles.

The last one looks like it may be a chunk of mica, which you might find abundantly in clay soils. They are made of many sheets or lamina of phase shifting material and produce diffractive effects.

Interesting, that makes sense. The colors really stood out compared to everything else in the samples.

[Sabatini]

Very interesting,

Thank you

[hans]

"2" is fungal, I think...spores of an ascomycete beginning to germinate.

I didn't find any example microscope images searching for "ascomycete" but based on your suggestion that it might be fungal I did a google image search "fungus branching segmented tube" and came across this document:

https://mycology.adelaide.edu.au/docs/fungus3-book.pdf

Alternaria alternata on page 4 and curvularia lunata on page 77 show some resemblance. Then the Wikipedia page for alternaria led to alternaria brassicicola with some photos that I think are the closest yet.

[hans]

Google image search for keyword "conidia" which I just learned about from the Wikipedia pages linked in my previous post turned up this:

https://mycokeys.pensoft.net/article/25665/zoom/fig/14/

Also looks pretty close, and shows the type of near-90-degree tee branching I mentioned in the original post.

[Bruce Taylor]

1 might be ophryoglena

Possible, though a soil sample is more likely to yield colpodeans. In any case, we'd need a view of oral structures for identification below phylum.

[Bruce Taylor]

Alternaria alternata on page 4 and curvularia lunata on page 77 show some resemblance.

Yup, that's the sort of thing I had in mind. Ascomycetes (fungi in division Ascomycota).

[Bruce Taylor]

I see on the Wikipedia page: "Colpoda inflata - Possibly one of the best known and most common species, noted for its fitful resting stage in which it jerks around in a tight circle, frustrating microscopists trying to photograph it live." Sounds exactly right, this particular one wasn't moving much, maybe unhealthy, but similar-looking ones were doing the tight circles.

Colpoda inflata is a very common species, so it is certainly among the possibilities. However, even if it is in Colpodea (which is far from sure!), it is a large, diverse group. Identification would require good views of mouth, pharyngeal structures, ciliation, etc.

[hans]

Yup, that's the sort of thing I had in mind. Ascomycetes (fungi in division Ascomycota).

Ah, yes, I was not having much luck finding similar-looking things searching "ascomycete" and blundering down the from the top-level ascomycota page on Wikipedia, then failed to notice that that those ones I eventually found images of were indeed ascomycetes.

[hans]

Regarding #3, I found the term "dyad" for this double-ball structure in the context of pollen but it didn't really help in finding similar example images. So far the examples I found were all aquatic plants. Since I see so many of them I assume they are coming from something nearby. If I wanted to try to identify them by looking at samples taken from plants in the backyard or adjacent canyon, can anyone suggest what general types of plants would be the most likely candidates to start with?