This is the infective L3 larval stage of a worm-parasite of Roe Deer. The adult worms produce eggs in the gut of the deer which are then expelled in the droppings. The larvae hatch and feed on the organic matter in the droppings, going through stages one and two. They then enter the L3 stage and bec...

Fascinating to watch and beautifully produced. I know many higher animals with large brains that couldn't build their own homes!

Thanks Charles,

yes I was mesmerized, I think I was looking at the same slide for around 3 hours!

David.

Riveting and fascinating.

I hope there's a happy ending!

Many thanks Carl. Great work and very generous.

Thanks Jacek.

I found this small Arcella case in a sample from a temporary flooded area in woodland. It is 55µm in diameter and the central aperture is 15µm. I had a look at http://www.arcella.nl/ and it looks like it might be Arcella hemisphaerica. Olympus 100X oil objective and a stack of around 40 photos. http...

Hi,

Thanks for the comments. All of the images were with an Olympus 10X SPlan objective with no coverslip. They are all pretty much in scale with each other as there was very little cropping and no stacking.

Thanks for the comments. I've realised that there is an advantage of tidying the background and filling it with a single colour - it reduces the jpg file size a lot so you can have less compression in the bits that matter. I think the two filaments are Spirogyras but I haven't worked out what the ob...

Here are a few photos of my first attempt at photographing crystals with polarised light. I used Citric Acid in water. It took an age to evaporate and when I put the slide under the microscope I could only find one crystal. I looked at the image of it on the computer but it wasn't very interesting s...

Wow! They are all outstanding.

I'd really like to produce a nice image of a Rotifer but I tried and I'm a long way off so I'm practising on things that don't move so fast! They were in the same sample of stream water and are individual stacks formed in to a composite image. Is that OK? - or too much editing.... the scale is the s...

Wow! That's very impressive.

Do you use special lighting or is that the standard lighting for the microscope?

Thanks for the comments and the identification. I think I was trying to get the highest shutter speed by keeping the DIC effect at a minimum as it was moving. The stack and stitch has given me a large image but not a lot of useful detail - I much prefer your single shot hkv. I think I would need a 4...

I've just set up Nomarski DIC on my microscope and here are some of my first images. All of the images are stacked. This is a larvae from a stream on acid heathland. It was my first try at stacking and stitching images taken on the microscope. The original image was 10,000 pixels wide. If anyone can...