Micro beasties

I bought myself another microscope. A cheap one, for students, with low magnification, but like the even cheaper one I'd had a few years back (that didn't last long), with the ability to take photos. The one I had been using up to now was for my eyes only.

Tonight, I set it up and collected some stuff from my aquarium; a teaspoonful of sand, a fragment of seaweed, a few empty (or so I thought) shells, and one of the smaller hermit crabs. Arranged them on plastic lids, since they needed to be kept in water, shoved them under the 'scope, and tried to focus. It's a bit difficult when your target keeps running away; even the seaweed was carrying mini-critters on the move.

Pacific rose seaweed, Rhodymenia pacifica. With worm and snails.

This delicate (but oh, so durable in my tank) seaweed is a sheet with one layer of cells. Here, each cell is visible. The fragment was about 3 mm wide. The worm, that looked like a hair, but crawled about slowly, is about as wide as one seaweed cell. Even through the microscope, I didn't recognize the dark patches, but once I blew up the photo, I see that they're all snail shape. No wonder I always have a batch of new tiny snails climbing the walls!

Another snail. Shell only, abandoned in the sand.

This was in the teaspoon of sand. The snail shell is about as large as the larger sand grains. Still tiny. With everything under a film of water, the microscope LED lights produce glitter. I edited out what I could without destroying what is underneath, but the tiniest white specks are moving critters, all constantly in random motion, sort of like a swarm of midges. Some of the brighter patches of light were pulsating, squirming something-or-others. I managed to see a couple of worms and something with legs before they hid under the sand grains again. Some of the sand grains were bouncing; there was something busy underneath.

On an old cluster of empty barnacle shells, a colony of orange-striped green anemones has settled in.

One of my smaller hermit crabs.

I've been wanting to get a good look at these hermits for a while. They look like hairies (Pagurus hirsutiusculus), but never seem to grow up to the expected size. Maybe I'm not giving them enough time. This one certainly looks like a hairy; banded green antennae, blue marks on the legs. But those two rows of lumps on the pincer arm look interesting: I'll have to examine more of these little guys.

A couple of periwinkles.

And a tiny snail, half the size of the smallest periwinkle, on the move. With sand grains for size.

This is fun! Let it rain!