Adventures in the Swamp

Mar 07, 2019 • 1:00 PM UTC

Palo Alto, CA 94301, USA

140x Magnification

Microorganisms

RebeccaKonte

Scientific artist, using art as a tool for scientific storytelling. http://www.rebeccakonte.com/

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Yesterday afternoon I had the chance to explore a place I’d never been with some incredible people!
The weather was brisk, cold, and rainy, but somehow it made it even more fun to be outside, digging into this swamp.

We filled tubes, bottles, and pans with samples of the swamp’s water and soil.
Every sample was just teeming with life!!!
I was really quite surprised by the density of organisms, in even unfiltered samples.
Here are a few quick & dirty videos I took just to give a sense of the density.
I’d like to come back to this spot soon & see how much biodiversity I can document in a day. There was so much to see, I can’t imagine what all I could find.

In marine samples I’ve collected in the past, copepods tend to be abundant.
But this time I noticed a copepod with eggs that had had a striking rainbow tube connecting the sac to the body?!

I wonder why this structure reacts to light in this way?

And finally, this dead copepod was just massive in comparison to the surrounding cells… For some reason, when I came across it, it felt like stumbling upon a dinosaur fossil. 🙂
Thanks to everyone for such a great afternoon!