One night, when I was definitely completely sober in every way possible (of course!), it struck me that while both the European and Chinese zodiacs (ones I’m familiar with) display a nice variety of animals with and without backbones (I happen to be spineless according to the European one, and scaly and flame-breathing according to [...]

A quickie post to assure y’all I’m still around. Got a few proper posts coming soon! Remember our testate amoeba friends, the arcellinids? Here is a pair of Arcellas (Arcellae?) in the midst of division. Organic tests(=”shells”) rust over time, as in they turn yellow and then brown with oxidation. Based on that, you can [...]

Bleary-eyed and staggering, many of us partake in a morning coffee ritual before mustering the courage to face the daily workload. In addition to psychoactive chemicals (drugs, anyone?), the coffee routine provides structure and emotional support — rumours suggest it may be largely a placebo effect, but I won’t go into that debate. Instead, I [...]

For me, the second more relaxing activity after microscopy is vector art. And then regular art. (This excludes non-activities, such as napping in the sun, and staring at life passing by. That’s all I’d do if one didn’t have to work — watch things.) Since I’m not often creative with my subject matter, the art [...]

Seldom do protists show up in public places (as man-made creations; plenty of them thrive happily unseen), especially those who reside where the sun don’t shine: the hindgut of wood-eating termites and cockroaches. There, they perform a function glorious for the termite or roach, but often annoying (or devastating) to us — they digest cellulose [...]

This Mayorella‘s (?) nucleus is smiling and wishing you a very happy day =) The auspicious pattern is formed by heterochromatin clumps. To the right of the nucleus is a contractile vacuole — devoid of any emotion this time. Cells do speak to you from time to time. In your head. Pareidolia is fun!

I may have mentioned a few times to never mess with amoebae. Let me reiterate how lucky we are to be a few orders of magnitude of size removed from those creatures. Remember yesterday’s prey-stuffed ciliate, Frontonia? Well, while procrastinating and perusing random literature, I came across this title: “Observations on Amoeba Feeding on the [...]

Frontonia are a large, gluttonous species of ciliates, which makes them a wonderful, colourful, subject of microphotography. Despite the modest appearance of their mouth, they can swallow some impressively big prey — the suture beneath the mouth can open to widen the engulfment. Essentially, the critter unstitches its belly to fit more in. Would be [...]

I’ll return to blogging by starting off with a stunningly boring micrograph. Here, you can see a narrow blob, with a blob attached, and a stem below. The scalebar is 2um, so we’re really up against the limits of conventional light microscopy here. *yawn* Not the most flashy micrograph you’ve ever seen, most likely. But [...]

A free-living cyanobacterium (above) lies next to its brethren from a distant past, now a chloroplast coiled up and trapped (for good) within a eukaryotic cell (bottom). The chloroplast still has remnants of the cyanobacterial genome, with a greatly reduced gene set. Both bacterial inner and outer membranes have also been retained — which is [...]