I went back to the water sample from yesterday's post with the intent of getting better pictures to help with identifying this little critter. After several attempts I gave up and went the video route. I've tried going through several keys to ID her but I appear to have little talent in this area. Specimen is about 250 um long.
If you have any ideas please post them in the comments. Ive been told by an expert this specimen belongs to the Order Ploima, and possibly (slight) to the Genus Proales.
I have a small 35 mm film tube that I put a grain of rice into as a food source to see what would show up. It turned out to be quite rich in species, mostly small algae, ciliates and flagellates. However there are a number of larger ciliates, likely Stylonychia, and what I assumed were flatworms. The mode of locomotion was very reminiscent of a ciliated protist. Wrong! I think. Yesterday I saw no evidence of a corona but today I did, a very small and unobtrusive one.
Yesterday I was able to count them in the dozens but today I found only a few but with a lot of oval cysts (or eggs). So I'm assuming they are cysts (or eggs) that were the result of yesterday's rotifers. Not sure what changed, maybe a dropping food supply or unfavourable water conditions. Several were quite lethargic and there were also a few dead ones laying around.
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| 35 um long, 20 wide, smaller than most bdelloid eggs |
I've been keeping a slide with some snail eggs in a "wet" container so I can watch the eggs develop over time. Over a couple of weeks nothing has happened to the eggs but we have a secondary event going on I found interesting. There was a population explosion of ciliates, and only one kind that I thought were Stylonichia. Along with these were a large number of cysts which I believed were associated with the ciliates.So now I believe I know what Stylonychia cysts look like.
This cyst (left image) was a stack of 7 photos to get the whole object into focus.
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| Genus Monoraphidium, idividuals are 14-21 um long |
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| Monoraphidium contortum, straight line length between tips is 18.4 um |
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| A few unidentified ones , small ones about 7um long and the raft of 4 about 10um long |
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| Genus Scenedesmus, 27 um long |
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| Unknown algae |
I isolated this large, contractile ciliate and chased it around the slide for some time. Even when 1/2 the water had evaporated from under the slide the specimen was still very active. No idea what this is. I have since been told this is actually a flatworm from Subphylum Catenulida.
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| In this view the specimen is 850um long |
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| In this contracted view the specimen is 480mm long |
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| Another view |
After yesterdays post about the hermit Euglenid that found itself in an amoeba test, I thought I'd like to practice my photography skills with the new microscope. So off I went, checking slide after slide with nary a euglenid in sight. Maybe another jar? ...success! Note to self: number the jars and record any findings with a jar number.
I took several photos before the little fellow started really squirming. One at 40X, a second at 50X (oil) and a third at 100X (oil). By the time I was shooting with the 100X the euglenid was quite agitated, I suspect because the cover slip moved when I was focusing. The length of the specimen was 95 um or about 1/10 mm.
This morning's session at the microscope introduced me to something I had never seen before; a eugenid housed in an amoeba test. Was this a protist emulating a hermit crab? I somehow doubt it and choose to believe the euglenid's journey just happened to take it through the entrance hole of an amoeba test.
The second find was apparently a member of the Genus Aeolosoma, a worm with red/orange fat globules.
The tulips featured in the last post are now wilting so I've dug in to get some more detailed microscopic images. Cutting sections is still a challenge but I'm getting better. Perhaps the secret is the double sided razors rather than the thicker single bladed ones I'm using. I've stitched together the best cross sectional piece I was able to get. I gather the 6 egg shaped forms are ovaries.
My wife was cutting down some tulip stems to make them last another few days and offered to donate some of the leaves and cuttings to my microscopy lab. So here I am trying to cut some freehand stem sections with very little success. The sections all had a number of cell levels and didn't show up well under the microscope. I only had the single sided razor blades, not the thinner double sided ones recommended so that may have been the problem. I was however able to peel a surface layer off a leaf that was only one cell thick and got some images of stomata and their controlling guard cells. The two guard cells, 57 um long and with visible chloroplasts, control the size of the stomata opening (28 um).
The original images were quite colourless so I experimented with a plastic petri dish cover as a wave plate and was quite pleased with the results.
While again trying to cut some thin stem sections, again unsuccessfully, I managed to peel off a thin layer of cells from the stem. Under the microscope I again saw stomata but this time the petri dish lid coloured it a nice blue. Also notice the shape of the stomata changed from almost spherical to elliptical.
All the species jars I created and collected from a fall La Salle river water sample are starting to really thin out and I'm left with few species, generally just a few predator worms and some ciliates and rotifers. Lately I've been searching for some diatoms in the jars to practice my photography. Here are a couple of samples. This first one may be Nitzschia sigmoidea and the second from genus Pinnularia.
