Darkfield Universe

Day 15: Anticipating the arrival of Christmas-present-to-self, I stopped at a murky local pond to collect water samples for examination. At home, I covered them with cloth to allow air circulation, and the following morning, I prepared concave slides from each jar and settled in at the microscope to look for protozoans and anything else of interest. I was hoping for hydrae or planaria among the vegetative matter, but found nothing but a pair of insect larvae and a few fast-swimming ciliates. Later in the day, I tried again with even poorer results, although one critter was a type I'd never seen. The only protozoans I know are those we covered in high-school biology! This feller was cute, shaped somewhat like a kiwi (the bird), busily using a long proboscis to feed itself algae. If it had had ears, it could have heard me muttering, "I bet I can't find another one like you when the darkfield gets here."

When the darkfield 'scope arrived on Friday, I assembled it and again prepared a couple of slides from each jar of pond water. In roughly two hours at the eyepiece, I may have observed as many as four individual ciliates during a diligent search, but not another "kiwi." I finally just gave up and took a photo of a galaxy of pond scum to celebrate the acquisition of a darkfield microscope. Darkfield microscopy allows for better viewing of detail by using diffracted (as opposed to incident) light. It is especially useful when looking at subjects such as fungus spores and lichen asci.