at present in my garden pond Chaetophora elegans is coming up. This algae
forms round, mucous beds of 1 - 2 cm in diameter. It can be found mostly on stones or dead twigs. The mucilage is pretty hard, so that it is not easy
to fumble a thin enough piece of it under the cover-slip.
Chaetophora elegans is also known as bristle-algae, because of its long colorless filaments that are formed mainly by older cells at the end of a branch. Here a view of that situation under the Stereomic:
Each bristle consists of several empty cells:
Inside the mucilage we find branched filaments:
Enjoy!
