Symbiotic diatoms in a shell???

[josmann]

Found this odd little critter in my creek jar. First image is a 58 image picolay stack at 100x magnification (10x and full frame) - it's around .5mm tall and appears to be clad in diatoms?!?!?! Shell is very hard. Focused midway through, eyes are visible - they were jiggling around slightly inside. It sort of reminded me of a planaria but I don't know of any shelled planaria!

weirdshelledthinglq.jpg (162.5 KiB) Viewed 1335 times

weirdthingeyes.jpg (75.4 KiB) Viewed 1335 times

[Javier]

Wow, that's interesting. Did you find out what is it?

[josmann]

Not yet! Maybe some sort of freshwater mollusk? I think I may have to pass it around a little more. I've got this and another darkfield stack and I'm going to make some gifs/stereo views with picolay. It's hard to get an understanding for the shape without this.