Bear hunting...

A tardigrade hanging on to some debris and checking out the surroundings

We STILL have two feet of snow over most of the ground up here in the Great White North and most of us would welcome even a hint of spring. Most of the few specimens I had in various containers were thinning out or getting boring. I needed some new specimens. Donning my Sorels, a warm jacket and a touque, I hiked into the woods near my place checking for moss in areas with some snow melt. Luck was with me and I cut off about 4 square inches of moss. Just for luck I also scraped off some light green lichen attached to some tree bark into a container. The temperature was -1C. Back home, samples of the algae and the lichen went into separate petri dishes and a small amount of distilled water was added to each. Impatience prodded me to keep checking for life but bed time arrived and I still hadn't found anything. Early this morning I squeezed some of the water trapped between algae fronds and checked it out under the microscope. Nothing.  Halfheartedly, I started looking through the lichen water and soon found my first tardigrade. Woo-hoo! Further searching found close to a dozen tardigrades, almost as many rotifers and one nemetode.

The above specimen appeared dead and when I tried to flatten him a bit to get more area in focus his skin broke and some of his inards spilled out. Check out the area near the back of his neck.

Frontal area of tardigrade

Here is a head shot that shows some of the details of the piercing and chewing apparatus. I've also uploaded a short video I took through one of my microscope eyepieces with a point and shoot camera.

http://youtu.be/1oHFeCgutdk

I also found a cuticle with 4 or 5 eggs in it but lost it while trying to transfer it to a slide. Must work on my lab skills.