Through the eye of a microbe
This has been coming for a while, but I needed a push to make it official. I’m not much of a blogger anymore (four posts a year doesn’t quite cut it), so it’s only fair that I wrap things up at SciAm Blogs, at least for the foreseeable future.
An advantage of having a, let’s say, ‘volatile’ memory is that you can sit back and do microscopy… on your own hard drive.
I finally made the move I was supposed to do months (if not years) ago! Through a strange twist of evolutionary contingency (the same kind through which our kind came about in the first place), Dalhousie University in Halifax has become host to one of the worst infestations of protistologists in the world.
Isn’t it great when your art subjects cooperate and model themselves? Algae are inherently photogenic — especially if they look like fuzz or goo to the naked eye!
Things have been a little tense lately… here, have a dinoflagellate! (kinda looks like a space ship, no?) This ink drawing is based on Protoperidium, a dinoflagellate notable for its ‘pallium feeding‘: upon finding something tasty but awkwardly-shaped, it extrudes a ‘feeding veil’ in the form of a pseudopod-like structure, which then envelops the prey [...]
There exists a wonderful book with an illustrated key to the more common protists you can find in freshwater: Free-Living Freshwater Protozoa by Paddy Patterson. However, as many good things in life, it is out of print and thus very expensive (though relatively cheap-ish in the above link at the time of writing this).
As penance for irregular posting, have a pair of seemingly-symbiotic rotifers in a cnidarian (jellyfish) polyp. There were several of them on several polyps, and they seemed not to mind the tentacles (loaded with stinging cells containing a harpoon-like weapon with paralytic abilities).
To keep things alive while I’m at an awesome conference (that you should follow on twitter, see previous post), let’s have a random image of tardigrade (water-bear) guts; the brown stuff is semi-digested food.
It’s that most wonderful time of the year again: the big protist conference season. Every year around this time, one or more of the protist societies hold meetings full of people who might actually understand and care about some of your research, minutiae or otherwise.
It's that most wonderful time of the year again: the big protist conference season. Every year around this time, one or more of the protist societies hold meetings full of people who might actually understand and care about some of your research, minutiae or otherwise.
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