Marek,
Yes, the first two were oblique brightfield (with 10X), and primarily intended to give some idea of the spherical (here round) colony before I went in close with higher power objectives.I especially like the two first ones. Are they taken with BF oblique illumination ?
David,
Glad you asked... it gives me a reason to fire up Google Earth, one of my favorite... and time consuming (wasting?where did you find them, I would love to discover some of these in my pond.
)... applications. These were found in a mass of free floating vegetation along the south shore of Lake Sammamish (a pretty large lake... 7 miles long by 1.5 miles) right where Issaquah Creek enters the lake. The vegetation was not rooted, but had been blown against the shore by a light wind. I collected a jar-full and was very pleasantly surprised to find dozens of these colonies.
Sort of, but not exactly. (I assume from the spectacular rendition of the cilia on the last three (higher mag) shots that you had these very well squashed down.
) To me one of the really fascinating aspects of rotifers is the often seen metachronal wave action of the cilia. If you flatten them down too much the cilia starts to hit the against the cover-glass, and lose that wonderful aspect of the sequential motion. So the colony is flattened a bit, but not so much that there were not plenty of individuals to be photographed where the cilia is very close to, but not "beating" on the glass. In image 4 and 5 (20X) 6 (40X) and 7 (60X) it was possible to show this natural action. In the last image you can see that some of the cilia is against the glass (to the right of the eye-spot) so some areas of the cilia show the very pronounced "wave motion" while others are "flat". I kept the cover-slip "elevated" more than normal by including a small branched piece of vegetation that appeared to be about the appropriate thickness to accomplish this task.Mike,
I've toyed with the idea of doing a live "webinar", but just don't know it there is a large enough "community" of interested people to warrant it. If it ever develops into more than a "thought" I'll let you know.did you ever consider giving a workshop?