One of my favourite locations for finding plankton is the beach of the Maasvlakte, an area reclaimed from the North Sea and part of the ever expanding port of Rotterdam.
In contrast with the adjacent industrial and futuristic landscape of harbours and all sorts of terminals, the part where I come accommodates a surprising diversity of wildlife.
For example I've spotted there seals, spoonbills and during my last visit I noticed hundreds of baby fishes swimming in the puddles on the beach, created after high water.
One of the samples was taken with a plankton net, and contains for the major part vegetable plankton, (microscopic algae, diatoms).
From that sample, the diatom I'm showing in this post looks like a miniature French bean and first I expected it to be a kind of (marine?) desmid. When examining it at higher magnification, noted the microscopic checked grid.
In the middle the "pillow box" is slightly dented, according to the shape of the pattern over there. I found the combination of the linear grid on the outside and the organic shapes on the inside, interesting.
The software used to process the 21 shots (Zerene), fortunately did a proper job to incorporate both in the final stackshot, without artifacts.
Equipment utilized:
Leitz Ortholux II Interference Contrast microscope (Smith T.) Fluotar NPL 40x/0.65, Periplan 10x GW eyepiece (FN24) .Canon EOS 70D camera with 40mm/f2.8 obective. For this picture the lambda plate was used, translating separate tones referring to local thickness of the object, into actual colours.
Still trying to figure out what might be the name of this marine diatom. Already skipped Pleurosigma as it lacks a couple of specific features i.m.o.
Can anybody give a hint? 
Due to file size restrictions of this (excellent) forum, in the 2nd and 3rd picture the image has been cut in 2 halves, allowing you to see more detail.
Thanks for watching. Feel free to comment or ask questions.
