Hello! My name is Germaine and I’m excited to be a part of this wonderful and far-reaching community. As a brief background about myself before I launch into my first post, I’m a 1st year biomedical sciences graduate student at UCSF. Together with my classmate Tina Su, we are planning to equip a group of 1st graders at Feinstein Elementary School in San Francsico with their very own Foldscopes this May. In the meantime, I’m looking forward to exploring the microscopic world around us with my Foldscope in stow wherever I go.

Diving straight into my first post: We managed to catch a grashopper-like insect that produced a special emulsion-like fluid during our visit to Stanford. With this fine specimen, I tried setting up my camera to document the fluid movement and leg hairs Leg Hair!! of the insect. I thought it was pretty cool how I could see the individual hairs on the insect’s legs. Sadly, the little bugger didn’t make it on the way back up en route to SF, so we don’t have any live images. Hopefully my next post will include some kicking action!

Leg Hair!!

Emulsion-like Secretion

It’s interesting how the fluid secreted has the consistency of an emulsion, and I wonder why the insect would secrete such a fluid. Might it be a chemoattractant for mating (since we saw the secretion before capture)? Or might it be an excretion of waste accumulation? I’m also curious to know how nature selected for secretion of a fluid with high lipid content(?) when the primary diet of these insects is probably herbivorous.

Hope you’ll enjoy my first 2 videos! They are far from perfect, but thought I’d drop a note and say hi. 🙂 I had issues with getting my camera to maintain an unblocked field of view, and to get my Foldscope to stay in focus during documentation. I tried stabilizing my phone on the table, but was still having issues. Happy to receive any tips and tricks, thanks!!

P.S. How do I embed videos (rather than links) into my posts?