This is approximately 30 seconds cropped from an 8 minute video. The video shows the periods of relatively calmer motion when the paramecium chose to hover and rotate along its longitudinal axis. The other seven and a half minutes involved me frantically following the creature at breakneck speed - my mechanical stage and fine focus were glowing red hot (ok - maybe that's a slight exageration). Here's a set of actual size stills from the video.
The video is in DivX format and hits the scales at around 6.5 Mb. If you have the codec it will play in Windows Media Player. The background may appear rather pixelated however the important detail in the paramecium has not been noticibly affected. If you are playing it in "DivX Player" you will need to set "deblocking" to medium or low if you want to observe the cilia in motion.
I find it interesting to look into and through the paramecium's body as it rotates. Click the link below to download the video:
http://www.tal-handaq.co.uk/paramecium2.html
I think that this is one of the smaller species of paramecium. If you can identify the species please do let me know.
Bruce
