Life in Moss

I picked up a bit of moss kindly thrown on my path by a bird. It was placed in a small petri dish and soaked with boiled tap water for a few hours:



Then the moss was removed and squeezed to drip some of the moisture in another dish. Now a small amount of that liquid was picked up in a pipette and a drop or two placed on a microscope slide. With the naked eye only a few minute dots could be seen in the water. After adjusting the lighting the sample was viewed to see what microscopic life could be found and photographs taken. Here are a few:

A nematode:


Probably a rotifer:


An as yet unidentified creature:


I must try this again with some moss from a different place.

Micro Video

Spent a while experimenting capturing microscope video clips on the iPhone6s.
The Apple photo app does a reasonable job but I found the free version of 'Moment - Pro Camera' gives plenty of manual control over still and video recording. The second section of the video was shot in 4K. Uploaded as 1080p



I put one small drop of water, from some old rain water which was full of green algae, on a concave blank slide. The largest living thing seen was the rotifer - still far too small to see with the naked eye. Magnification was around 250 times.

Colour fringing at the edge of the video can have two causes:
Phone not perfectly aligned.
The standard for objective lenses says that the centre 60% should be sharp but the outer 40% will show signs of softer focus and possible colour fringing.