Day 118: For some time now, I have been pinching up moss samples from various locations in my yard (and sometimes elsewhere) in the hopes of being able to find tardigrades (also known as "water bears" or "moss piglets") with the microscope. For months, I had been astonishingly unsuccessful with what should have been a relatively simple exercise, and I finally discovered that the problem lay in my technique. After agitating my moss samples in water, I had been trying to avoid picking up debris with the pipette. As I learned a few weeks ago, that was also why I wasn't picking up any tardigrades. The cover glass on the first slide I prepared successfully was held a bit too far aloft to get good focus on my subjects. A fragment of moss gave them far too much room to swim around, but I was able to observe at least half a dozen through the objective. My next several attempts were miserable flops, even though I'd taken the moss sample from the very same fence rail under similar weather conditions. This morning, I was almost certain I'd failed again with the sample I collected yesterday, but taking a second drop of water for examination brought this little character into view, stretching out and contracting as it moved across the slide almost too fast for me to capture with the camera. As it turned out, I had found a rotifer rather than a tardigrade, but it was exhilarating nevertheless.
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