tree top tardigrades, and a wagon full of water bears

[charlie g]

Happy Halloween to all, I have a huge Black Walnut tree in a meadow..the heavy and huge lower limbs make me cringe each time I mow grasses under this assortment of heavy ( and old!) lower limbs.

Paying high cost..I had an arborist with a 'cherry-picker' truck, remove these huge limbs. I could not gain traction on sale of the large girth black-walnut limbs...so I am forced to chunk this walnut for winter fire-wood ( Black Walnut a fair to medium fire wood).

Just as our apple trees host large encrustations of lichens, this huge and 100-plus year old Black Walnut tree hosts rich coatings of mosses and fungi on most of it's limbs. This tree is in a meadow..not sheltered for moisture on it's limbs in a collection of tree canopies...I wonder how and why these dense felt coatings of mosses thrive on this tree..and not on adjacent maple-trees?

Today I tricked our good-doggie into fancy of why we are collecting a wagon full of water-bears, I suggested; 'Todays the day the water-bears have their picnic' ( I lifted that theme from some childrens song about: 'the teddie-bears picnic'.).

Please visit and enjoy this microscopy of 'tree-top tardigrades'...communities of moss/lichens over thirty feet above meadow...of course the red-squirrels , and birds, and insects constantly interact with this unique community. But I wonder why adjacent maple trees never host thick adornment with mosses and fungie ( as does this huge Black Walnut tree).

[charlie g]

Using bottled spring water, I flooded shavings off tree limb moss coatings. After four hours outdoor ambient temperature , I placed the flooded shavings at my microscopy bench,

[charlie g]

Simple isolation technique for a target organism: elongated water drop on a slide..scan with 4X objective...quick 'slurp' with a pipet of region where a target organism is observed...transfer this sample to a second slide for wet-mount/ coverslip observations.

For me, the curious finding of a large 'water bear', with a much smaller water-bear ...both with same anterior 'snout'...yet the smaller water bear with no internal pigments...where as the larger tardigrade has pigments within it's body...is the tiny 'bear' new born?

[charlie g]

I wonder if this ' pigment free', and tiny tardigrade , is a new offspring of the much larger water bear?

Again, happy halloween, thanks for visiting finger-lakes/ U S , for this 'bear hunt'. charlie guevara