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Bdelloid rotifer development

| Thu Sep 09 51013 05:56:40 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)



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I have moved to a new kind of foldscope-inspired project– growing near pure cultures of microbes; ciliates, little animals etc. At the outset, let me confess that not one of my cultures has successfully propagated over the past 6 months or so. Wasted plates, contaminated media, complaints from other human residents of the house about stinky cultures, a tinge of disappointment– I have been facing all this and more. Someday I will see the light, but till then the journey of failure has been a wonderful learning experience.

You can imagine that I keep scouting for new candidates to culture. It was in this light today morning that I came across a strange looking globule in my lichen suspension. With a pasteur pipette I pulled it off my plate and put it on a slide to watch under the foldscope. An hour passed and nothing happened, and then duty called and so I had to be gone for the day. Almost as an afterthought, I just set it up for timelapse under the foldscope taking pictures every 30 seconds for as long as it would take to fill up my phone.

I came home tonight almost running over three deer and 2 raccoons and barely escaping the traffic cop’s gaze. To my disappointment, the moving edge of the water drop had moved my sample away, but I thought I’d render the time lapse and see the movie anyway. So without much ado, here it is and what happened is pretty self-explanatory.

Hint. Since it is a short video, you might want to slow it down using the youtube settings at the bottom, see it at 0.5x the speed.



Locations



Categories

Type of Sample
unknown
Foldscope Lens Magnification
140x

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