Nassula picta from moss culture

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tlansing
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Joined: Sat Aug 01, 2020 3:15 pm

Nassula picta from moss culture

#1 Post by tlansing » Tue Mar 21, 2023 12:14 am

I was recently inspired by a post on the German forum (https://www.mikroskopie-forum.de/index. ... ic=45839.0) in which a moss aquarium was set up and the organisms that appeared were examined (there is also a more detailed post on the same forum, https://www.mikroskopie-forum.de/index. ... #msg297841). I thought I would give this a try so I collected some moss from a tree in my front yard, placed it in a glass petri dish and covered it with spring water purchased at the grocery store. It has bee sitting on a shelf near a window for several weeks now, and I examine it occasionally. There are a lot of bacteria, some rotifers, lots of flagellates and amoebae and ciliates. Here is one I saw today, Nassula picta. I took these photos focusing particularly on the large microtubular structure that the ciliate uses to grab onto diatoms and algae to ingest. This is called the cyrtos or nasse. The colorful food vacuoles are due to the digestion products from the algae. Pretty cool.

The photos and movie were taken using a Canon 1300D camera on a Zeiss Photomicroscope III. The objective was a 40x plan achromat and the optovar on te microscope was set at 1.6x. Flash was used for the still photos.
Nassula_picta-1.jpg
Nassula_picta-1.jpg (68.75 KiB) Viewed 282 times
Nassula_picta-2.jpg
Nassula_picta-2.jpg (64.85 KiB) Viewed 282 times

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