Porcupine quill

[Macro_Cosmos]

Vintage British slide. How do people collect these quills? Go around and harass some innocent porcupine... and pluck it out of oneself? Or maybe an innocent pet got a spike-ful?
Don't google the title if you aren't prepared to see some very uncomfortable images. (people and pets covered with porcupine quills, looks painful as)



10x objective mag, DIC, 9-image-stich panorama. More info and bigger here: https://flic.kr/p/2jZFm1b

[Pau]

Interesting structure, it's awesome how many different things can be made with just keratin.

Are the colors only due to polarized light or is it a stained slide?. Nice picture in any case!

Porcupine quills are a normal souvenir for tourists coming from some African countries, I have few ones after a trip to Tanzania, imagine what Victorian hunters could had bring back to Britain

[Macro_Cosmos]

Interesting structure, it's awesome how many different things can be made with just keratin.

Are the colors only due to polarized light or is it a stained slide?. Nice picture in any case!

Porcupine quills are a normal souvenir for tourists coming from some African countries, I have few ones after a trip to Tanzania, imagine what Victorian hunters could had bring back to Britain

The colours are due to crossed polars. It's orange/yellowish in brightfield. Not sure what mountant was used, probably Canadian Balsam. I tried XPL vs DIC, DIC yielded a little more "observable dimensionality", if that makes sense. However the difference is so minor it might as well not exist.
I did see some porcupine quills listed on ebay, some are massive... imagine making one of those creatures upset. I wonder how they made the slide. Probably cut a thin section then sand it down? Crafty people.

[Peter M. Macdonald]

My wife and I visited a small zoo on the Spanish island of Menorca some years ago. They had a pair of porcupine. In their enclosure were quite a few loose quills. Sadly, there was no keeper about, or I would have asked him for a few.

It seems that a porcupine quite regularly sheds quills, without any trauma.

[Lou Jost]

I am puzzled, the scale seems way off if this is the cross section of a porcupine quill. It would appear from your magnification of 100x that this quill is about the diameter of a large diatom. Yet quills are much thicker than that. What is going on?

[rjlittlefield]

100x objective mag, DIC. More info and bigger here: https://flic.kr/p/2jZFm1b

I am puzzled, the scale seems way off if this is the cross section of a porcupine quill.

Looks like a typo. The Flickr posting says 10X objective, 9 images stitched.

--Rik

[Macro_Cosmos]

100x objective mag, DIC. More info and bigger here: https://flic.kr/p/2jZFm1b

I am puzzled, the scale seems way off if this is the cross section of a porcupine quill.

Looks like a typo. The Flickr posting says 10X objective, 9 images stitched.

--Rik

Silly me! Yeah it's a massive typo, 10 times off for the matter. I've been mainly using my 100x for DIC. Fixed the top post!
10x, 9 images stitched, single frame.

[Lou Jost]

That's much better!

[micro_pix]

Nicely done! I have a few porcupine quills collected on a walk in a wooded area near the small town of Underberg in South Africa, I never saw the porcupine though. I going to have to slice one up now.

Dave