MicrobeHunter.com Microscopy Forum

Is DIC something that's within the possibility of hobbyist microscopy, or is that a pipe dream?

(also, yes, 100% recommend Journey to Microcosmos. It's great footage, and Hank Green's dulcet voice is a boon to any science video)

This was taken with an oblique light filter with a small off-center circle, which I found gave me the best contrast on the cilia. Any cilia that weren't on the edge of the paramecia were pretty much invisible with regular brightfield. At the same time, though, you can see that the filter results in ...

Turn the lights down low...
Put on some music to set the mood. Something with a nice groove. Make sure the door's closed.
Open this video and get ready to enjoy the beautiful exchange of genetic material. Oh yeah.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ueZnpo9h4TA

Hey, my first impulse was right! How come some of them are clear like that, and some of them are bright orange?

I took some samples from a nearby pond, and I got a ton of these things in it. They're hollow spheres with an opening on one side and several protrusions on the opposite site. https://i.ibb.co/3WJK0hV/oldfolks-sediment-testate-40-brightfield-EDF-1-small.png At first, I thought they must be testate a...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rx1HEHzRTkQ You can see in the video that it has small, extendable claws like a tardigrade's on the front and the back. It's way too long to be a tardigrade, though, and seems to have an articulated joint before the head and biting mandibles. Some kind of larva? But I...

Does that work well? I've been looking for something to slow down the little zoomers enough to get better pictures.

What kind of lighting is that on the unidentified ciliate?

Edit: Wow, for some reason it didn't show me your last reply in this thread. Already answered!

Is it slowed down, or in glycerin or something? I've never seen cilia move like that before.

Got some recordings of a Stentor of some kind last night. First, swimming freely: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxhlulT0IT4 And then later, rooted: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0znNzVP6es Scale bar for reference: https://i.ibb.co/m877Kdh/Huntley-Meadows-surfacescum-stentor-10-brightfield-3-sma...

I probably should have been clearer - what I'm wondering is whether there is any difference between the different oblique filter shapes. I can't seem to detect much of a difference except that larger shapes let more light in.

I ordered a set of filters from an ebay seller, mostly for the darkfield filters sized correctly for my objectives. They also came with some oblique filters, though. A cut-out circle to the side, a crescent moon shape, a different moon shape that has a solid rim for some reason, and a double flower ...

I found this amoeba in the sediment of my algae culture bowl. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOchECLsts8 The amoeba is too large to keep the whole thing in focus at the same time, so I focus back and forth through the video to bring different parts of it into view. Picture for size reference, as I ...

I can't figure out what I recorded here. The movement could be organelles, bacteria, or just Brownian motion - it's pretty small. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AwVZouJGS8 Here's an image with a scale bar, since I haven't figured out how to add those to videos in ToupView yet. In this image, it do...

micro wrote: ↑

Fri Sep 11, 2020 6:22 am

that be a fox

Please bear in mind that this is a cryptic species complex, and we don't have all the data yet. Also, as you can see, there is a lot of cellular distortion from the cover slip in this particular image. It might be a fox, but species-level identification of this subgroup is difficult.

micro wrote: ↑

Fri Sep 11, 2020 6:02 am

link not working

Not sure why. It's a link to a tweet. Here's the image directly. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ehm-1C_WoAA ... ame=medium

Here we see the ciliate Hypotrichia Vulpinarius under the slide. They're a large ciliate, so the cover slip causes a little distortion, but the basic anatomy is recognizable. https://twitter.com/hourlyfoxes/status/1304283387889364992 Note the black-tipped adoral zone of membranelles and the large, p...

Very nice, great picture.

When I find a big Closterium, one of my favorite things to do is record the Brownian motion in the barium crystals. It's soothing, somehow.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOjyfcW4uKI

Yes, that's why I asked "how." Apologies if I somehow gave the impression that I was blaming the equipment.

I'm a novice at this, so I'm just looking to confirm some of my IDs. I believe, based on what I can see, that this is some kind of Hypotrich. Is that correct? Here's a video recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unJGIB4MV-g Here's an image with a scale bar. It's blurry, but useful for size. htt...

Asked and answered! Thank you, mrsonchus.

Apologies if this is answered in the ToupView documentation, but I couldn't seem to find it. Sometimes, I'll snap a picture in ToupView and realize that I had the wrong magnification selected from the drop down. If that happens, I can't seem to figure out how to make ToupView change the magnificatio...

Thanks for the help. Yes, I've actually had more use out of the key by following it backwards - locating the picture that looks most like what I'm looking for, then seeing what questions lead to it to determine if it's a match. That kind of matrix key would be very useful, and definitely possible in...

I don't have much in the way of useful advice, but I want to say I love this subject. I have one passion for hobbyist microscopy, and another for ancient numismatics. I never thought to combine them! Best of luck! Edit: After reading the thread more carefully, I may have some useful input after all....

Hello! I'm a hobbyist-level microscopist, and I've been relying pretty heavily on Free-Living Freshwater Protozoa: A Colour Guide by D.J. Patterson for identification of the protozoa I'm finding. This guide uses a binary key to sort the protozoa it identifies, which isn't my favorite method, but the...

That's a good idea Bob, I'll probably try it tomorrow.

My camera is a little bit out of focus from the objectives, but not by a whole lot. I tend to get a focus through the eyepieces before I even think about the camera, anyway.

Thanks for the tips Hobbyst46, but those are things that I've mostly considered and tried. And yes, I never use the coarse focus knob above 10x. One thing I hadn't considered was the position of my fine focus knob when focusing with the coarse at 4x, so I'll try fiddling with that and see if I can g...

I recently replaced my 100x oil with a 60x dry objective. I'm having difficulty keeping it from crashing, even though it seems parfocal with the other objectives. As soon as I begin focusing with the fine focus knob, I see things in the wet mount start to shift around, which I assume means the objec...

If you have access to pond water, keep two containers of water from the same source in different conditions (light, temperature, sealed vs open, etc) and see how the populations in each differ over time.

I'd like to find some sediment-dwellers, but putting even a tiny grain of sediment on the slide lifts up the cover slip quite a bit and unbalances it. I know the trick of putting two cover slips underneath the third in order to lift it up, but then I run into the problem that there's quite a lot of ...

After some more reading, and based on the jumping movement it was exhibiting before I recorded this, I'm pretty sure it's a Halteria. I was getting tripped up because the equatorial cirri were long enough to look like stiff flagella of some kind.