MicrobeHunter.com Microscopy Forum

I was really surprised to see this, the shed cuticle of a water bear with 8 eggs in it! I had no idea they could have that many inside them. How was there room for anything else?

Now that's pretty cool!
CE

It sure is cool Eddie! I made sure that went back into the petri dish where the eggs will hatch.

Excellent again Lily - I suppose they may lay/deposit those eggs as they are exiting/shedding the old 'skin' - rather than co-habit as it were with the full-sized eggs. Interesting, I'm even beginning to get the urge to learn some more about them. Your excellent sharing is getting us all going - even a committed leaf-botherer such as myself. I suppose I may claim that I 'found some among my collected mosses'..

Keep up the good work.

John B.

mrsonchus wrote:Excellent again Lily - I suppose they may lay/deposit those eggs as they are exiting/shedding the old 'skin' - rather than co-habit as it were with the full-sized eggs. Interesting, I'm even beginning to get the urge to learn some more about them. Your excellent sharing is getting us all going - even a committed leaf-botherer such as myself. I suppose I may claim that I 'found some among my collected mosses'..

Keep up the good work.

John B.

Why thank you so much John! <curtsy>

I agree, they deposit the eggs in the cuticle as they are shedding it, but wow, she had to have all 8 of those eggs inside her when she did it, and I find that really surprising. I've seen a lot of water bears with eggs in them, but never that many, only one or two usually. I've found 4 water bears this morning and I'm far from finished.

Here's another one I just found, 3 stack:

Very interesting stuff - I can clearly see the hooks at the ends of it's chunky little legs! Often I greatly prefer brightfield images such as yours to the ultra-detailed SEM or TEM images that are so easy to search-out that they almost seem to 'give away the ending' of such adventures.
I feel exactly the same way when I mount for example pollen for brightfield - it's about enjoying the experience for me, and not the hyper-detail that's available online - the satisfaction of gleaning details and information from my own adventures, or in this case from yours, is the reason I love Botany and microscopy so much! Every encounter reveals something new or stimulates the old grey-matter into another bout of enquiry - great fun and very inspiring.

Nicely done Lily my friend.

John B.

And here's another one, water bear no. 5 for this morning, 3 stack:

And here's water bear No. 6 for the day. I found 3 of them on one slide:

And here is water bear No. 7 for today, very good detail, going in closer for head details next:

Water bear No. 8, no stack. At this point I'm just trying to see how many I can find in day:

Water bear No. 9, 100x no stack, I like the pose in this one:

Water bear No. 10, not the best image, but nevertheless the 10th one I found today.

Water bear No. 11, 100x, again not the best image, but sometimes you have to just take what the slide hands you. 2 stack.

Okay, after almost 12 hours of water bear hunting I'm taking a break. I'm starting to get slide hypnosis here. Time for a drink.

Impressive water bear hunting. And great images.

billben74 wrote:Impressive water bear hunting. And great images.

Well I thank you for that, but they were not all great images. They were just what I found today. I might yet go back at it. Fortunately I seem to live in water bear central, and all the images I have yet posted came from the lichen on just one tree. I'll certainly be back at it in the morning.

I do know that many have done a lot to find these creatures without much success, and I count myself very lucky to have found as many as I have.

Fantastic tardigrade images, Lilly...thanks for sharing these treats. Charlie guevara

Good findings!

I've been trying to look for these myself.