Merismopedia

I did manage a few water samples before freeze-up and one of them held a specimen I hadn't seen before.  It was from the genus Merismopedia, a member of the cyanobacteria. They reproduce by fission in two planes, thus forming sheets with a thickness of one cell.

This specimen was collected from shoreline sediment on the La Salle River.

The cells are about 2 microns in size. The photo was taken in phase contrast with a 40x objective.

Centropyxis Amoeba

I feel somewhat negligent since I see that my last post to this blog was made over 4 years ago. However, my microscopes are set up in the new house and I've found a camera tube that should result in some better photography with my Zeiss PC microscope so hopefully I'll be posting more regularly again.

After filtering some of the water from the bottom of an aquarium I found a whole bunch of these empty shells of a species of Centropyxis amoeba in the collected detritus, and oddly enough, no live ones up to this point. No apparent reason that there shouldn't be live ones since I've found all sorts of live micro-organisms. So, another mystery to be pondered and perhaps a search continued.

This is also a first experiment with the stacking software, Zerene. I'm happy with my first attempt using brightfield with my Leitz Laborlux S and am anxious to try it with images from my better microscope.