I went out looking for a pill bug. Normally they are everywhere but this time they all remained hidden. Par for the course. Then I remembered the position of an ant nest so spent ages trying to persuade one to stay in the dish I had taken out. Nippy little blighters in more ways than one. In the end I managed to capture one and it was only when I had the dish under the microscope I found I had also caught a couple of other creatures.
So, we have an ant and what appears to me to be a mite. It was smaller than a red spider mite, hardly the size of a speck of dust and only just viewable with the naked eye. What the creature that reminds me of a hermit crab is I have no idea as yet. It was even smaller than the mite. The zoomed section was done in processing the video. All other parts are exactly as taken by the microscope. The only addition was using an external lamp to help with illumination.
One thing to note is the build in LEDs can reflect back in the camera lens but the microscope is designed so it can be tilted to get round this.
Looks promising,I think the mite is exactly that or maybe a Tick. Lord knows what the tiny thing is. The ant is very impressive. Why are we seeing the underneath? Am I missing something?
ReplyDeleteAdrian: The only time the ant stopped rushing about was when it was under the lid of the dish.
DeleteGive it a bit of honey to eat. I didn't realise that you had a lid on. It is good but may be improved by cutting some matt paper and bribing it to sit on that. In the past I've tried making an island for things to stand on and popping water in the dish. I had mixed results with spiders.....most times I ended up with very wet spiders.
DeleteAdrian: Thanks for the useful tips.
DeleteIt may be worth popping the dish and subject in the fridge but I didn't have any luck as they warm up too fast.
DeleteAdrian: That's what happened the time I tried chilling a subject.
DeleteWhat fun, John! The still shots in yesterday's post were very good, too. I am really looking forward to more. Another thing you could try is to place a drop of pond water so that it hangs from the lid and focus on the "hanging drop". I remember this technique from my university science lab classes.
ReplyDeleteWilma: A good idea though anything much smaller than a cyclops or daphnia might be difficult to see with this microscope. I do have thoughts to try adding an external lens to see whether that would let me see smaller objects.
DeleteMore tomorrow folks.
ReplyDelete