Backyard Biotech: Life under the microscope
What's in your rainwater, pond, and birdbath?
Looking at prepared slides was a great way to get acquainted with the new-to-us OMAX microscope. Prepared slides catapulted us into a world we knew existed, but had never really seen. After a few weeks of it, we were itching to expand and look at some samples from our own backyard!
Our very own lacewing.
Slide Prep
The great thing about microscopy and us is that, at this stage, everything is fascinating to us, as we know pretty close to nothing. Even just deciding what type of glass slides to get was fun!
The slides we ordered were flat ones, have a frosted end for marking, and 45º corners with ground edges for safety, and come pre-cleaned.
They even gave us All-Thumbs-ers a frosted end to hold on to. Thanks, clever slide-makers!
After we got our (clean) hands on some blank slides and cover slips, it was time to collect our samples. As there are different types of slides, there are also many ways to prepare samples for viewing. We decided that simple was the best way to start. That meant we would just collect stuff, put them on the slide, and look at them…and see what we see 🙂
Fortunately, we didn’t have to venture far: turns out there is interesting Stuff-with-a-capital-S everywhere we looked!
Could it be that SOMEONE “borrowed” a jewelry box from SOMEONE ELSE?
RainyDayGarden
We have always been fascinated with ferns, and so the first microscopy samples we wanted to view were the structures of the various types/species in the RainyDayGarden 
A little snip of this, a little snip of that, and you got yourself some nifty little slides…
All very Zen. Except for the razor blades.
Below are two “action shots” of a Japanese painted fern, at 4X and at 10X.
Looks a bit like street traffic…
The three shots of the tip of a Boston Fern (Nephrolepis exaltata):
You really ARE ready for your closeup!
In the box were some of the seeds collected from the RainyDayGarden. The jewelry box with the cotton batting kept the samples separate and in place. It would probably be pretty good for dead bugs as well!
Also: Jewelry.
The photo below shows the different seed types we collected. It seems clear that the Queen Anne’s Lace seed’s strategy for spreading is to snag itself on something, and then get carried away.
The plant-world version of “Calgon, take me away!”
Lots of spikey hairs protruding from the core…no cover slip was used as the sample was too thick. At 4X magnification, the hook at the end of the spikes were visible. Below is a 10X image of the tip of the seed…quite the pointy end!!!
Ow ow ow ow ow
Rain Water
Given all the rain the area had received this season, the garden gauge seemed like a natural place to take samples. We took samples at various depths just to see if there were any differences.
Not exactly the inky depths, but it will do.
While we didn’t see anything extraordinary, we got the most “bits” from the sample taken at the bottom of the gauge. No big surprise there, as it was a funnel-shaped vessel.
Is this where modern art got its start, looking at garden-gauge bits through a microscope?
Pond Water
We heard about a toxic algae bloom at Jamaica Pond, so naturally we had to swing by to get a sample.
Warnings about the toxic bloom were posted everywhere. Sure enough, one end of the Pond was choking with a mat of something. We have seen scenes like it in the past, but never this bad…there was a lot of “green” in the water. We collected some samples, but were careful not get our hands dirty doing it.
Is this goo? Is this ooze? One ponders about the pond…
We thought we would find more algae types, but this was the only green thing we found in the sample. We asked around, and the answer seems to be it is Botryococcus, a genus of green algae.
Or, a teeny-tiny but badly drawn map of Greenland.
While exploring a water sample from Jamaica Pond, we came across this (below). Clearly a remnant from something bigger, but we couldn’t tell if it was from a plant, an insect, or what.
We don’t really know what we are looking at most of the time, but we are completely fascinated by the structure and complexity of what we are randomly coming across.
What we do know is that, in the micro world, just because it is “hairy” it doesn’t automatically mean it is from an insect…
Tad poles…hair plugs…greater minds than ours would be similarly flummoxed.
Not really sure what this (below) is, but we like the blueish bit in one of its appendages. The general consensus from the sources we reached out to was that our hydra-looking thing is a plant trichome. Apparently, they fall down with other plant matter, and decompose slowly.
So THAT’s what happened to the Space Shuttle’s O-rings…
Video
We’ve been looking at the water sample from Jamaica Pond for the past week and have finally managed to get some images of the single cell organisms which had been flitting by (but were moving too fast to photograph)!
Next up: to learn about staining and to try our hands at some samples for a better look!
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