You'll be seeing an amoeba approaching a vorticellid, maybe sizing it up as something to eat.
It's about 15 minutes of observation, speeded up 15X to give 55 seconds of excitement(?). No audio, sorry.
This is my first public foray into video microscopy. Hhmm, first posting to YouTube also. And maybe the most interesting amoeba activity I've ever observed -- not that I've spent a lot of time observing. Lots of firsts here!
Cultured from a freshwater sample of shoreline debris, Columbia River near my home in Richland, WA.
The equipment was pretty modest: Amscope T490B trinoc microscope with 40X NA 0.65 achromat objective, recorded in full HD (1920x1080x30fps) on Canon Ti1 at about 56X on sensor (0.40 mm field width, says the stage micrometer). Post-processing in Camtasia, I cropped it to 1280x720 (0.27 mm field width) to eliminate extraneous parts of the field and get rid of an annoying shift in framing. I also bumped the brightness and contrast and toned down the added saturation that resulted from those. 15X speedup in Camtasia, produced in 720p for upload to YouTube.
Illumination was brightfield with "sleazy oblique illumination", to wit, I opened the condenser iris all the way and rotated the filter tray until its edge blocked about 1/3 of the objective aperture. I assume that a UGF filter would be better, but I didn't take time to make one of those.
All comments appreciated -- hope you find this interesting!
--Rik
