Blank river slides, piftall goings, microscope

Blank river slides
I took some water and debris - mud from the edge bottom and leaves - from both the stream (large) and the canal that feeds the cultural center's taro gardens. I didn't see anything in any of the water samples, even the ones that included muddy water on the slide. Nothing from scrapings off the leaves. I don't understand this, since the streams are supposed to be alive, but I guess it makes me trust the water more?

I technically did find a few organisms, but hardly any. Perhaps the pond, which was my comparison, is just over-full with life, so that mud from the banks contained a lot. Thus sampling methodology is more important in the stream. The stream is also running water, not stagnant. I confess, I couldn't get out into the stream proper to take a mid-stream bottom sample, only edges; but I got scrapes right off the canal bottom.

I just find the blankness quite interesting.

Pitfall traps
Pitfall traps collect two types of things so far - springtail and pillbugs. When I was putting the springtails under the microscope, they all seemed different - various levels of hunchback. But, someone here said something to make me feel like they're the same type.

The fact that millipedes and pillbugs alone fell in was surprising, because the soil and leaf litter around the trap was crawling with spiders and bugs as well as the springtails and millipedes.

When I took out the ethanol cups I left empty cups behind, creating a dry trap inadvertently, but the dry traps were not effective compared to the ethanol ones.

The system took a few days to get going. After 1 day I found nothing, and after 3 days I found plenty of, as I said, springtails, millipedes, and a few flies. And maybe one ant?

it took a few days to get going - 1 day was nothing, two more days led to springtail haven.

Dry traps don't work at all. (I left them out for four days).

Springtails
It turns out, springtails have scales; this is news to me. When they were in the ground they seemed whitish. After being in the alcohol for near a week, they were drab grey and blackish. I don't know if the ethanol changed their colour or if this is a function of seeing them up close. They did lose some scales to the trapping method. :P

Microscope
Currently, the 40x objective is not useful to me because everything becomes so blurry, not even due to the short depth of field, but just intrinsically hazy in an incurable-by-focusing way. I don't know what this is, but maybe I'm using the microscope wrong? I would like to clear this up because I could use the higher magnification for some of the smaller critters, especially a ciliate I just found with 'bubbles' inside of it and what appear to also be green inclusions.

Learn
The more I go the more things turn up to learn? Like, springtail anatomy and now ciliate anatomy, or was it the other way around?

Posted on November 16, 2021 06:35 AM by lsifer