Heavily cropped and resized. Focus stepped from near to far.


A couple of weeks ago, I posted over in the macro forum some shots of the whole foot of a jumping spider. Jumping spiders have "sticky" feet that get their adhesion from Van der Wals forces acting on a multitude of tiny "setules" that are clustered at the ends of spatulate hairs. The setules can be clearly imaged using SEM, and the macro shots might just barely be resolving individual setules, so it was natural to ask what they'd look like with a high resolution compound microscope.
Shown above are a couple of answers to that question.
I'm pretty sure that the top set of pictures is one spatula lying flat, while the lower set is a different spatula lying a bit on its side. It seems that each spatula has a few widely spaced bristle-shaped projections on one side, and a dense regular array of setules on the other side. Spacing of the setules measures 0.7 to 0.8 microns, smack in the middle of the size range that we guessed from some of the SEM pictures that people tracked down.
This was my first foray into high magnification photomicroscopy. I'm pretty satisfied with how these shots came out, but the equipment setup was definitely what you'd call "cobbled together" and the whole affair was rather more tedious than I'd like to do on a regular basis. (This, mind you, from a man who regularly shoots 70-100 frame stacks for extended depth of field. Hhmm...

--Rik
PS. These shots are green channel only. Color added no useful info and I found the CA fringes distracting.
Here's what a larger section of the slide looked like, using a 10X objective with no cropping. Shot through the oil drop left over from the 100X objective. The bubbles are in the immersion oil used as mountant.
