Jellyfish gravity sensing organs
Posted: Fri Sep 06, 2019 10:14 pm
I was going through some old slides and found a tiny specimen of Rhizostoma pulmo (a jellyfish) that I prepared back in 2005 and decided it would be nice to share an interesting feature of the organism. Jellyfish (known as Scyphozoans) can detect the direction of gravity through an organ consisting of sensory cilia and a statocyst which is a collection of tiny calcium sulphate crystals (statoliths).The cilia sense the gravitational pull on the statoliths and this helps the jellyfish orient itself.
Below are a few stacks (3-5 shots each) of such statocysts. In the higher magnification you can even see the geometry of the statoliths which seems to fit well with what I found online. The coloured background on the lower magnification images is achieved through combination of DIC and a full lambda plate (you can notice a colour gradient due to an imperfect combination of a 10x planapo and a 16/0,35 Plan DIC prism).
BR
Wes
Below are a few stacks (3-5 shots each) of such statocysts. In the higher magnification you can even see the geometry of the statoliths which seems to fit well with what I found online. The coloured background on the lower magnification images is achieved through combination of DIC and a full lambda plate (you can notice a colour gradient due to an imperfect combination of a 10x planapo and a 16/0,35 Plan DIC prism).
BR
Wes