MichaelG. wrote: ↑Sun Mar 31, 2024 7:16 am
You make a very good point … but perhaps that ‘short’ description reveals that most previous observers have seen
less detail than you have.
The motion of individual cilia is, I believe, rather like a whip-crack and therefore exceedingly difficult to image.
… I think you are already doing better than most !!
I was just lucky, it died (no more oxygen) in that position, showing me its cilias, at the border / outside of some remaining water. I was lucky and it was because I'm often looking at drying or even dried slides also.
This was at 60x, were I have not much resolution, neither can I do a lot with oblique illumination here. So it should be complex to deliberately concentrate on thin cilias in common wet and live conditions.
I think cilias and flagellas movements are fast to very fast, so we mainly see their bases in normal observation conditions And in common representations, they are by the way all described as short, which could be their bases only?
Vorticellas are also fast, much bigger, more easy to observe, but they could need up to costly 1400FPS cameras to catch the details when they quickly retract...
There we can read flagellas have a passive part/base. If they are thin and fast, we probably won't see most of them, unless their bases.
