STEP 1: Brainstorming

Daniel and I conducted this project as part of Professor Pringle’s EEB321 class at Princeton University. The guidelines of the project were simple and meant to inspire our curiosity: we were instructed to “creatively and thoughtfully document something ecological” using our Foldscope.

With the open-ended nature of the project, instead of setting out with a specific plan, we began by walking around campus and searching for anything that would be interesting to take a look at with our Foldscope. After about a half an hour of walking around and inspecting specimens, we somehow ended up in our dorm room. Surprisingly, this is where we came up with some of our most interesting research questions. Looking around our dormitory, we found plenty of objects and specimens that we wanted to examine, especially thinking about communal areas such as kitchens, water fountains, restrooms, etc. Eventually, we settled on observing objects and specimens that were in our room, as we thought it would be most fun and interesting to study things that we were in contact with every day.

Figure 1: The room we used for our Foldscope study.

STEP 2: Data Collection

Object 1 – White Fungus

Figure 2: Unknown white fungus growing in our apple seed pots.

Figure 2: Foldscope slides of the unknown white fungus.

The first specimen that we decided to examine was an unknown white fungus that had been growing in the soil of some apple seeds that we had been growing in our room. We chose to start here thinking that it would be interesting to look at a living subject and to perhaps find out something and identify this “unknown fungus.” After placing the fungus on the slide and thoroughly searching through the slide, we didn’t find anything in particular that stood out to us. However, the one thing that caught our eye were multiple brightly colored orange-yellow objects that were mixed in with a dull sea of grays, blacks, and browns.

Object 2 – Potting Soil

Figure 3: The soil and trays that we were using to grow our apple seeds.

Figure 4: Foldscope slides of our apple seed potting soil.

Since we didn’t find much within our slides with the fungus, we decided to move on and take a look at something else with the Foldscope. Thinking of the possibility of having a good chance of finding some living, moving specimens, we chose to take a look at some of the soil that we had been growing our seeds in. Over the few weeks that we had been growing our seeds, we had kept the atmosphere humid with plastic wrap over the trays and multiple different, once again unknown, plants had begun to grow in our soil. As we looked through the soil, we had trouble finding anything that didn’t just look like “dirt” to us. However, what we did find again were multiple of the same orange-yellow cells within the soil that looked almost identical to the one we found in the slides with the fungus.

Object 3 – Protein Powder

Figure 5: The Gold Standard protein powder that we examined and its nutrition label.

Figure 6: The Foldscope slides of the Gold Standard protein powder.

Despite the connection we found between the fungus and the soil, at this point we still didn’t see this peculiarity as anything worthy of further investigation. What we wanted to do know was take an entirely different direction and choose something unrelated to the apple seeds we were growing. We now chose to prepare a slide with some protein powder that we had in the room. As soon as we placed this slide under the Foldscope, to our surprise, we found that same peculiar orange-yellow cell.

STEP 3: Formulation of Research Question

With this strange connection between these three slides, especially with the seemingly separated nature of the protein powder with the fungus and soil, we thought that this would be an interesting research question to try and answer: what is this particle that we found in our three slides and how did it get there?

STEP 4: Analysis & Conclusions

Our first hypothesis was that with the coloration of the objects that they may have some sort of plant matter. At first, this seemed to make sense. Since we had plants growing in the soil and since the fungus had been growing on some of the plants, it would have made sense to be able to find similar cells between these two sides. Our next thought was that there may be been some plant based ingredients or plant based protein within the protein powder. However, after looking at the ingredients we found out that this was not the case.

We spent a little time stumped, but we were still intrigued by this question, so we decided to conduct more research. Our next hypothesis that we came up with that connected these three objects was that it may have been something in the air that was in our room that had found its way onto these objects and into our slides. Knowing that there are plenty of small particles in the air, especially in any living quarters, we knew that there was a good possibility that there was some sort of random floating particle that could have made it into our samples. Understanding that with the way these particles looked, that they weren’t any dead material such as paper or textile fibers, we began to look in to what skin cells, hair cells, and other dust particles looked like under the microscope. After some investigating, we came to the conclusion that what we saw were pollen spores. Looking at the pictures of different pollen and spore taxa (as shown below), it seemed likely that this is what we saw. They were similar in size, shape, and color.

Image taken by Maria Carolina Vargas of the Colombian Petroleum Institute showing light microscopy photos of several pollen and spore taxa

Although this was a very common particle that many people run in to, our discovery of this fact was quite interesting to us. To see that these particles were that wide spread, even though we couldn’t see them, and found there way into three random object that we decided to look at under our Foldscope.