It's full of Actinosphaerium

[Javier]

I have a new sample full of Actinosphaerium. I founded five today on a single slide. I made a short clip using different magnifications and illumination techniques. I'm almost sure the Actisphaerium captures a Didinium on the oblique illumination section. Quite cool!

My equipment is the usual, iPhone 5s mounted on Amscope c120 b.

Hope you like it, I'm quite happy with this observation.

[Javier]

One thing I forgot to mention is that I found it quite difficult to get details of what I think are food vacuoles inside the cell. There are so many layers to pass through...

[Wes]

This is really beautiful footage and particularly impressing that you produced with a phone. Can you tell me more about the specimen preparation, how did you mount it (i.e. floating coverslip or simply a drop of water added to a slide) and such?

[Javier]

This is really beautiful footage and particularly impressing that you produced with a phone. Can you tell me more about the specimen preparation, how did you mount it (i.e. floating coverslip or simply a drop of water added to a slide) and such?

Thank you, Wess.

I just added a drop of water to a slide and added a regular coverslip. I had to google what floating coverslip is and I'm not sure I got it. There where a lot of debris and the sample, so it wasn't very thin.

What caught your attention about the preparation?

[Wes]

Hi Javier,

I asked about the sample preparation because I found it interesting you managed to capture so many species of Actinosphaerium and was wondering if you had to gather large amounts of bottom sediments or something like that.

A floating coverslip is exactly what it sounds like. You take a clean coverslip and you drop in on the surface of a water sample, due to water surface tension the coverslip will hang there with one side completely dry and the other making contact with the water sample. After a few days you carefully move it from the water sample to a microscope slide and observe what kind of ecosystem formed on the coverslip underside. Below is an image to illustrate how it looks like.

[Javier]

Hi Javier,

I asked about the sample preparation because I found it interesting you managed to capture so many species of Actinosphaerium and was wondering if you had to gather large amounts of bottom sediments or something like that.

A floating coverslip is exactly what it sounds like. You take a clean coverslip and you drop in on the surface of a water sample, due to water surface tension the coverslip will hang there with one side completely dry and the other making contact with the water sample. After a few days you carefully move it from the water sample to a microscope slide and observe what kind of ecosystem formed on the coverslip underside. Below is an image to illustrate how it looks like.

Thank you, Wes. It certainly looks like an interesting technique. I will try it in the future.

I forgot to mention that I did something different this time when taking the sample. Instead of taking the sample from a single place of the puddle, I collected water and sediment from six or seven different places. Not that these places were far away, since this is a tiny puddle, but it might have helped bringing some diversity to the sample. I could not believe how many different species I found.

I do not observe from a single slide. I no longer do casual observations. Instead, I take a whole afternoon and take five or six slides with large coverslips, to get and idea of what the sample has to offer. Generally, I find new specimens as I keep looking. For example, on this observation all the slides showed Actinosphaerium, but the coolest appeared on the third slide.