You may be shocked to know that, on a rare occasion, yours truly does look at things that are not protists. Sometimes even finding them interesting. And often taking far too many photos. So I have this stash of photos that might even be interesting, but completely irrelevant to anything I do — as most [...]

The previous Mystery Micrograph was of the surface of Blepharisma, a characteristically pink ciliate. You can see rows of the pigment granules responsible for the unusual colour. Not clearly visible throughout most of the image (only on the top side) are rows of cilia that are interspersed between the pigment granule rows (about every 5-7 [...]

Microgromia is a tiny amoeba with an organic shell who, much like a spider, lays down a sizeable spread of thread-like pseudopods (filopodia) lines with sticky extrusomes, waiting for the unfortunate bacterium or eukaryotic flagellate to stroll by. Unlike a spider, Microgromia does not need to wander off to apprehend trapped prey — its ‘web’ [...]

Some amoebae build elaborate houses for themselves to live in. (top and side view of an Arcellinid) Some build their houses out of siliceous (glass) scales and peek out of them with thread-like pseudopods called filopodia. (optical sections of a Euglypha cristata from a soil sample) Some amoebae can be naked. (Saccamoeba(?) Note the wrinkly-bulby [...]

(I’m pretty sure every non-strictly-autotrophic thing has some form of appetite. Some ciliates and amoebae just tend to display it more prominently — as in this cool video of a Climacostomum devouring a flatworm!) Frontonia is a genus of predatory ciliates who feed on anything from algae and bacteria to fellow ciliates (and anything else [...]

Starting with something perhaps more familiar, like a diatom, here I wanted to show an example of what different optical sections can reveal about an object in the microscope. Experience with beat-up student scopes (or none at all) often leads you to think the world in the microscope as being two dimensional — depth somehow [...]

Back in the good ol’ days on Skeptic Wonder I used to run a little “Mystery Micrograph” series, where an image or a plate (that’s not immediately obvious without context) would be grabbed from a paper and posted without source, and much agony would ensue over trying to figure out what it is (or some [...]

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 [...]

I have a confession to make — even though I work with ciliates at the moment, I have a bit of an unhealthy obsession with amoebae. I love them to the point that I get offended whenever anyone within earshot insults them as ‘formless’ or ‘shapeless blobs’. Amoebae might be fairly squishy, but one cannot [...]

Am back, I hope! Don’t pay any attention to the dust… “What dust?” Exactly. It took a while, but after finally attaining the necessary potentially-overpriced fancy pieces of glass, the lab scope can now take acceptable DIC images. Meaning yours truly can once again slightly misappropriate lab resources during strange hours of the night and [...]