Separating potential eggs from the rest of the soil is complicated. We ended up using a combination of methods that culminated in several little tubes of soil solution, each capped with a glass cover slip. The lightest material would float up over time and land on the slip. After leaving them overnight, we put the slips on microscope slides and (very very) carefully carried them up from the basement lab to the seventh floor, where the microscope lives.
It’s a very nice microscope. It connects to a computer, so Smith and me could do it together. She mostly operated the microscope while I snapped pictures of anything remotely interesting. Here are some of the highlights.
First, what's probably an ascus. This is a spore capsule from an ascomycete fungus. Ascomycetes are one of the main groups of fungi, containing all sorts of things from yeasts and lichens to some of the mushrooms.
Two tiny lumpy things that we thought might have been eggs before we figured out how to make a scale bar. They're both too small, really.
A strange, three-part object that I found over a dozen of across two sites. It looks like something germinating. Sometimes the central part was quite long, making the whole thing into a U-shape.
A couple of moss spores. There were lots of these. We got quite excited when we first saw them, as they're about the right size and shape for some types of worm egg, but alas, they're definitely moss.
Finally, something that I thought was a moss spore too, but Supervisor noticed looked a little different:
I've yet to confirm, but this might be an egg. Perhaps. I'm going to track down the parasite curator this week and see if I can get her expert opinion.
No comments:
Post a Comment