Walk and Scope with Microscopical Society of San Francisco

Apr 02, 2025 • 5:40 PM UTC

United States

340x Magnification

Fungi

Damon Tighe

I currently work as a Curriculum and Training Specialist at Bio-Rad laboratories and help teachers incorporate more biotechnology into their classroom. I worked in DNA sequencing for years including the Human Genome Project and single cell genomics (termite, cow, and other guts). I have a love of the outdoors that I spread to the public via Calnature.org. I enjoy backpacking, picking mushrooms and photography.

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This past Sunday I had the pleasure of taking a group of microscopy-curious folks on a Walk & Scope in Joaquin Miller Park of Oakland, California. Most had heard of Foldscope but hadn't had a chance to play with one yet.

On our short walk we gathered fungi, plants, water and other things to look at. Some of the most beautiful things were Peziza cup fungi. We made smash mount with a glass slide, cover slip, water and a drop of Melzer's reagent which helps stain certain carbohydrates:

Peziza at 50X. You can see the clusters of Ascus, the spore bearing cells:

Peziza at 140X. Able to see a single Asci with its 8 spores:

Peziza at 340X where you can see the spore texture and see that the Melzer's reagent has stained the tip of the asci blue which is known as a dextrinoid reaction and can be helpful for species identification.

Anytime I use foldscope on organisms I upload them to iNaturalist and add them to the Foldscope project . It makes it easy for me to find organisms I've seen before again because I can search by location, taxonomy, date, etc and lots of professional scientists are there trying to learn about species biogeogrphy. I also have 90,000+ observations which would be hard to keep track of any other way. Here is the Peziza:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/268011783

People photos from the day: