Wonders of the Micro World

my bacteria grew in a heart shape 💖 (there's gotta be a 1 in a million chance of this ever happening)

The sand in Okinawa, Japan contains thousands of tiny “stars”. These “grains of sand” are actually exoskeletons of marine protozoa, which lived on the ocean floor 550 million years ago.

AAAAHHHHH, my area of expertise!! Okay, so these little guys are called foraminifera, or forams for short. Foraminifera is their order name, for anyone interested. (Remember Kingdom-Phylum-Class- and all that fun stuff?) Foraminifera translates from Latin meaning ‘hole bearers.’ Keep that in mind, we’ll get back to it a bit later.

Forams are super cool because they are a single-celled organism that creates a calcareous shell around themselves as protection. A calcareous shell is kind of similar to the calcium in your teeth in a way. Forams take calcium out of the water that they live in to create their shells.

So why is this neat, you may be asking? Because there are something like 4,000 living species of forams in present day and many many more throughout geologic history. Forams also are a fantastic indicator species, so an organism that likes to live in very particular environments depending on the species. For example, some only live in the deep, deep ocean. Other species love the warm waters of the Bahamas or other tropical environments. Certain species also can indicate things like salinity levels in the ocean, calcium levels, and oxygen levels. Basically, by IDing the forams we find on the ocean bottom, in oceanic sediment cores, and fossilized into rocks, they give us a fantastic look back in time to help identify previous oceanic conditions thousands or even millions of years ago.

Also, forams do create the ‘star sand’ that you can find along certain beaches of Japan but they’re so much cooler up close!

See those little holes in their shells? That’s how the foram feeds itself. It sidles up to a food source (usually a diatom, bacteria, algae, or any detritus smaller than it on the ocean floor), then it extends these sticky tenticle-like things called pseudopods from its single-celled body through the holes in the shell and absorbs the food source. There’s a fascinating video showing this if you go to YouTube and search for ‘Orbulina feeding on Artemia’. These holes are also how the foram moves around underwater. It can extend these pseudopods to slowly pull itself along.

The star sand forams are neat but are far from the most beautiful forams, in my opinion. Most forams create a spiraled or multi-chambered shell like a few of my favorites below. (These are forams from the Bahamas if you were curious)

This one here is called Archaias Angulatus. It starts life out as a small, roundish shell like in the top row of diagrams, then creates this flat, galaxy-shaped edge to it as it grows bigger. Again, you can see the holes in the shell used for feeding and maneuvering.

This is a poor picture but this guy is called Discorbis Rosea. Rosea meaning pink after the color. There are some beaches in the world that look pink because of the shells that have washed up from dead forams like these. You can see the holes in the shell on this one too, as well as a really great example of how the foram builds more chambers as it grows bigger kind of like a snail’s shell.

This concludes my Ted-talk for the evening, please do send me questions or messages if you want to know more! I did my undergrad research on foraminifera and it’s always so exciting to tell people more about them! Think of how many forams there might be at the beach the next time that you are there - right underneath your feet and you wouldn’t even know it…

Collins Wide World Encyclopedias: Animal Life. Written by Alfred Leutscher. Compiled and edited by Kenneth Bailey. 1977.

Sand Under a Microscope.

Sorry for the shaky footage (I really ought to get a stand for my phone) but would you believe it! It’s Noctiluca scintilans!

They’re known for causing bioluminescent waves that glow bright blue…. At least when there are a lot of them. I collected a plankton tow sample off the coast of LA and this was the only one I found. You can’t really make glowy waves when there’s just one of you, but I applaud him for trying his best.

in my last botany lab the professor had a prepared slide of diatoms set up for us to look at and i was not prepared for how delightful the slide looked

Need this as wallpaper

Germ tools

Unidentified protist. Quite the hyper one. 

unrestrained summer fun

TIL that chalk is actually tiny protists called foraminifera mixed with the corpses of sea algae. 😮 📷: PLOS Biology http://ift.tt/29SIFm8

I spent five years smearing the corpses of dead sea creatures over black boards. I’m way more metal than I thought I was.

CORRECTION!

These are Coccolithophores! They’re single celled plants which are covered in those plates (coccoliths) which you see in the picture. Pretty sure what we have in the picture is an example of Emiliania huxleyi which is the most common species in the modern oceans by far. Foraminifera are much bigger and don’t photosynthesise.

The big thing that takes up most of the picture here is a BABY foraminifera, the smaller blurry blobs in the corners are big coccoliths. Bit of a difference.

“Imagine yourself back in the early 1900’s with no TV or internet for entertainment. Luckily affordable microscopes are the latest thing and you’ve started collecting weird and wonderful objects to look at.

They were created by Ernest Heath, probably using a wet paintbrush to pick the shells from samples of sand and mud. We don’t know much about him, apart from that he was a fellow of the Royal Microscopical Society, somehow got hold of deep-sea mud from around the world, and must have had a lot of time on his hands!”

Read this blog post about the microscopic foraminifera collections of Ernest Heath.

@micromademacro

Look at all the different foraminifera!

Bizarrely, you’d think that 100 years on we’d have come up with wonderfully new and progessive technologies to deal with these tiny critters. But nope! 2015 in my Micropalaeontolgy masters, we were still moving these things around with a damp paintbrush. (My slides were nowhere near as neat as these though)

I think Mr Heath’s glue may have been better than mine, and he definitely had a steadier hand.

Friend of Skunk Bear Murry Gans runs the scanning electron microscope lab at Eastfield College in Mesquite Texas. His blog is full of incredible close-up images of everyday things. The latest entry: a rose from the Eastfield campus.

Under the microscope, the velvety petals are revealed to be made of thousands of raised bumps. The leaves burst with color - and their undersides are studded with stomata that open and close to allow gases to enter the leaf. The anthers, which produce pollen, are made of strangely wrinkled cells. They remind me of fisarmoniche pasta!

You can check out more close-up images of roses (and lots of other amazing images) over on the blog. 

Diatoms I’ve found over the years, marine and freshwater

Diatoms are photosynthetic microorganisms that are abundant across all aquatic environments, yet most people have never heard of them. They have golden chloroplasts encased within a silica shell.

Absolutely stunning set of photos of various modern day diatom species.

Submitted by francesgreenleaf

Picture of the anaphase of mitosis I took in biology.

My comments: Nice! This is when one cell splits into two.

We think of sponges as soft and squishy, but those are the synthetic sponges you can buy at the store. Real sponges are tough and feel like sandpaper, and that is because of microscopic crystal structures embedded in their “flesh” called spicules. 

Here are some cast-off sponge spicules I found floating around a sample of seawater. 

Here we go, a spicule of my own - found in a clay lump washed up on Texel beach in the Netherlands.

A Valentine’s Day photo for those who love microscopy amongst other things. Feel free to use as a base and adapt it as you like but please try to credit the source (micromademacro) where possible. Cheers!

Bonus:

Oh, as for the more technical details… Unknown minerals and/or species throughout. The photograph was taken of a sample run through pollen analysis preparation including staining. If anybody can identify any of this, or wants to ask questions regarding possible identification, I’d love to hear from you.

And don’t forget! You can submit your own microscopy photos too!

Happy Valentines Day all!

Diatoms sense the ‘odor’ of stones

Diatoms are unicellular algae that are native in many waters. They are a major component of marine phytoplankton and the food base for a large variety of marine organisms. In addition, they produce about one fifth of the oxygen in the atmosphere and are therefore a key factor for our global climate. However, these algae, which measure only a few micrometers, have yet another amazing ability: they can “smell” stones. “To be more precise, these algae are able to locate dissolved silicate minerals,” Prof. Dr. Georg Pohnert, the chair of Instrumental Analytics at the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, Germany, explains. A recent study by Pohnert and his research team published in the current issue of Nature Communications demonstrates that diatoms are not only able to trace silicate minerals in the water. Moreover, they can even move actively to areas where the concentration of silicates is especially high.

Karen Grace V. Bondoc, Jan Heuschele, Jeroen Gillard, Wim Vyverman, Georg Pohnert. Selective silicate-directed motility in diatoms. Nature Communications, 2016; 7: 10540 DOI: 10.1038/ncomms10540

Various diatoms

Excellent little introduction to these tiny glass plants. Only a small variety of the shapes these things come in though!

Licmorpha, I think

An epiphytic diatom that is commonly found attached to kelp and filamentous algae

Here’s another Licmorpha species attached to some red kelp. Both were found off the coast of San Diego