October 26, 2012

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Some sights about the microbial world

Back! Well, trying to — long story short, life got in the way of blogging for a while there, but of course I still really miss it. Won’t bore y’all with details (for now).

By Psi Wavefunction

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This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American

Back! Well, trying to — long story short, life got in the way of blogging for a while there, but of course I still really miss it. Won’t bore y’all with details (for now). At odd hours of the night I’ve hijacked the lab scope for, ahem, totally not personal use, and accumulated a few thousand more images than I’d really care to have to deal with — and they do like to see the light of day somehow. So I’ll dump them here in various batches until my writing muse/spirit/ghost/gnome/whatever squeezes some long article out of me. This batch will be thoroughly random and devoid of any system — mostly just glimpses of the microbial world, which was a fancy way of saying “they looked kinda pretty on my screen”. So, I hope you enjoy! There are plenty more for later…

(click on the images to view in full size and resolution)
 

A colourful assemblage of life from a summertime sewage treatment pond in Indiana. On the left is a blob of cyanobacteria, to the right of it is a green alga Scenedesmus, and below it appears to be a cyst of some green algal thing. The microbial world can be quite vibrant in colour, especially when photosynthesis is involved. 100x obj, DIC

Surface of a marine nematode from North Carolina beach sand. Strictly speaking, not in the microbial world, but still part of their environment as a microhabitat of its own (especially after death). 40x obj, DIC

View of the edge of a pennate diatom frustule (‘shell’). This view makes it look kind of glassy, I think, which makes sense given it’s made of silica. 100x obj, DIC

Cellulose fibre texture visible in the cell wall of the empty Spirogyra cell to the right. To the left is a live cell with a prominent helical plastid. The organised round structures along the plastid are pyrenoids with associated starch granules. Lake Monroe, IN; 100x obj, DIC

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Bacterial flagella visible (arrowhead) in this rather large (for a prokaryote) specimen from a sewage treatment pond. Bacterial flagella are usually quite hard to see, so these giants were a lucky find. In the leftmost frame (optical section just beneath the glass coverslip) lie more normally-sized bacteria. 100x obj, DIC

Cyanobacterial filament from a puddle in a boggy area near ? i Lofoten, Norway. (Arctic bacteria!) 100x obj, DIC

A pair of diatoms from an alpine pond north of Vancouver, BC. Appear to have a gelatinous sheath around them of some sort. The big refractile blobs are lipid granules for storage.

That’s all for today’s image dump; trying to decide whether to show you some close ups of ciliates, collections of critters found in fun locations like North Carolinean pocosins and the Norwegian arctic, general assortment of really weird critters, views inside cells, or something else entirely… thoughts?

About Psi Wavefunction

I first encountered the wonders of the protist realm back in childhood, when a murky droplet of pond scum was revealed by the microscope to entail an alien world in its own right. It took another decade to discover there was a field and a community dedicated to these organisms, and I bade farewell to the study of more familiar big things. As a kid I was also fascinated by tales of exploration of the New World, as well as those of fantasy worlds. I was then sad that the age of surveying new landmasses on earth was over, and that human extraterrestrial adventures are unlikely to happen within our lifetimes. It seemed everything was discovered already. But that could hardly be further from the truth -- all that is necessary to begin one's own Age of Exploration is a new approach or perspective, and a healthy does of imagination. Since reality has conjured far more than the human mind alone ever could, science yields a way to write stories much wilder than fiction. All one needs to access the alien world of microbes around (and inside) them is a shift of scale by simple glass sphere.
I'm currently finishing up my undergraduate degree in Vancouver and in transition career-wise, hopefully to end up in graduate school soon. I was born in Russia (and speak the language) and spent most of my life in US and Canada. In addition to protists, I'm fascinated by evolution, including that of culture and languages, diversity and biology of cells and how they self-organise, linguistics and anthropology, particularly of the less talked-about cultures, sociology of science and plenty of totally random things that snag my attention.
Banner image was kindly post-processed and enhanced by my friend: an accomplished comic artist who goes by Achiru.

More by Psi Wavefunction

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