Stellato pilosus

Images made through a microscope. All subject types.

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Olympusman
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Stellato pilosus

Post by Olympusman »

Stellato pilosus.jpg
Michael Reese Much FRMS EMS Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, USA

Ramos Kenneth D
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Re: Stellato pilosus

Post by Ramos Kenneth D »

Beautiful shot! I was looking for something like this quite a number of months ago but it went by another name I was thinking. I used to see them quite often in prepared slide kits that came with student microscopes in Biology class back in my high school days, if I am not mistaken. :-k Anyway my search was unsuccessful. :smt102

Edit: Silverberry scale! That was it. :)

rjlittlefield
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Re: Stellato pilosus

Post by rjlittlefield »

Hmm... The web tells me that "Stellato pilosus" is cactus pollen. But other images labeled "silverberry scaly hair" have extraordinarily similar appearance.

Olympusman, can you confirm the ID? What's the magnification?

--Rik

Pau
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Re: Stellato pilosus

Post by Pau »

I think that they are plant trichomes, often known as stellate trichomes, scaly hair or as stellate scales, likely from silverberry leaves.

Sure, googling "Stellato pilosus" you get lots of images of the same subject and many of them are told to be cactus pollen, but I'm 99% certain that they're wrong. This is a very classic beautiful microscope subject.
Pau

rjlittlefield
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Re: Stellato pilosus

Post by rjlittlefield »

Somehow I'm getting the feeling that a slide labeled "Stellato-Pilosus, W.M." (stellate hairs, whole mount) got picked up and transmogrified when somebody interpreted what they thought was a scientific name.

But I cannot work out the details of a path like that, because Google search cannot map the words to any cactus, and Google Translate cannot map them to any language.

Visual similarity does not seem to do the job. If I search images for "cactus pollen SEM", everything I get looks like either normal pollen or these stellate hairs.

If anybody has more detailed speculation, I would be interested to hear!

--Rik

Olympusman
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Re: Stellato pilosus

Post by Olympusman »

I recently bought a set of prepared slides from American Science & Surplus - one of those 100 slide kits. this one labeled as being a Celestron Kit. I've bought a few of these over the years and I end up trashing about half of them. Most of the time the diatom and protist strews are stained beyond usefulness. There was on slide labeled DNA and RNA that looked like frog or fish blood - trash. Anyway, I agree this is some kind of stellate trichrome, but this is how it is labeled. But every once in a while there is an interesting mount. These 100 slide kits on ebay appear to come from the same outfit in China and the mix of slides varies.

Mike
Michael Reese Much FRMS EMS Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, USA

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