A colorful little tardigrade...

Here is a video of a fairly colorful tardigrade circumventing his little world of detritus looking for his next meal. Doesn't look like he found any and obviously has no concept that he may have traveled that path before.

 

The little fellow went for a nap (died?) after the video was taken which allowed me to take a number of stationary photos. This enabled me to stack a number of photos to get the whole image into focus.

I also managed a photo of his buccal apparatus which could help in IDing this specimen. So far we've only identified him to genus level; Genus Ramazzottius.

 

Lacrymaria olor (Swan tear)

 Yesterday I had found a, rare for me, Lacrymaria olor specimen and decided to move it to a clean slide for some imaging. I did manage to pick it up in a micro-pipette and transferred the water droplet to a new slide. A quick check with a low power objective confirmed it was still there so a cover slip was put on. Another quick search failed to locate it and a slow, methodical second look indicated why. It seems L. olor was swimming around in the water outside the cover slip. I washed it back into the jar so I could look for it another day.

Fast forward to today, I found 2 specimens from a different source. Go figure! Anyway, this time I made a video to put up. No feeding display, only searching.

 

A mystery solved...

 

 

Quite often we find odd little critters under the microscope lens that defy identification despite best efforts. Often they have added appendages or shortened features that just don't fit what the identification keys are leading you to. This has happened to me a few times when, after watching a video about centrifuges, I spun the samples at 4000 RPM as described in the video. Apparently this is a no-no and eukaryotes should never, if you value their well being, be spun at more than 800 RPM. Other injuries can be sustained when transferring specimens from jar to slide and then there is the always dangerous cover slip. In the following video is a peritrich that is stuck in some fibers that I thought might be loricated (encased in a shell) peritrich but was unable to ID with the keys available to me. An internet ciliate expert, Bruce Taylor, suggested that it might be a distressed member of the order Sessilida. That got me thinking about checking out that particular jar for similar specimens and the mystery was solved. This was a peritrich that looked like a type of vorticella that had its stalk and myoneme broken off.

 

An amoeba ingested a diatom...

 This little fella had ingested a fairly long diatom but seemed to not want to, or be unable to, relinquish it despite it seeming to cause it some locomotion problems. In the past I had seen an amoeba let go of a long filamentous algae that it just couldn't envelope.  

 

Some Peranemids showing metaboly movement under darkfield illumination

 On April 21 of this year I posted a still image of some Peranemids using a darkfield oiled condenser and 50X oil objective. A few friends commented on a video I had made of the same group so I thought I'd post it now. It's a useful video for showing euglenid metaboly motion.

Stentor Roeselii video, Codonella cratera and a few others...

 

Codonella cratera, one of the few freshwater tintinnids 

Genus Spirostomum

Unknown ciliate

Heliozoan, possibly Actinosphaerium eichhorni

This amoeba was dragging around a big diatom it had ingested

Stentor coeruleus under a cover slip

In my last water sample from the La Salle river I was lucky enough to capture a number of Stentor coeruleus. These large bluish-purple Stentors can be spectacular when observed under a stereoscope with a higher power but the detail doesn't show up till you get them under a coverslip. With careful observation you can see the moniliform macronucleus, the oral ciliature and membranelles, cortical rows and the contractile vacuole.