Stentor Close Up

discomorphella · Post by **discomorphella** » Mon Mar 11, 2013 1:42 am

With warmer weather my pond has thawed and now many creatures are emerging, shaking their cilia and getting settled in for the new growing season, which for protists means mostly eating each other or bacteria and/or debris, and for some, conjugating. Among others, there's been a bloom of Stentor coeruleus, at a density of a few/ml from certain spots. I watched a few of these eating some bacteria and also smaller flagellates and tried to get a closeup of the AZM while it was eating. I managed to catch several bacteria going "down the hatch" as well as some closeup shots of the adoral zone. Then I got greedy and withdrew too much water from under the coverslip and crushed all of my stentors...BX-60 with flash/DIC, objectives 40/0.85 or 60/1.2 with UCA magchanger from 1 to 2.0. Variozoom/0.32X eyepiece / projection lens to a D300. Images histogram adjusted, sharpened and retouched with imageJ.

David