Ooh, interesting to learn! I think it is because I only collected a few samples from the wild when I first got my microscope and still had no idea of how prepare the samples or what I was looking it, so if there was a stentor in there I probably did not notice…
I have practiced since then with fresh samples of things that I find around my apartment and things that I culture - and the occasional lichen. Tomorrow I will go find some samples from outside - I will get some biofilm from a pond too and look for stentor.
Oh cool, thanks for sharing! Biofilm is exactly where I tend to find them. I think they need a decent bit of oxygen, and if there is algae then they’ll eat the bacteria attracted to algae’s oxygen.
My most stentor populated samples were pond samples with a good bit of dirt and leaves that I sat on a shelf for a few days.
Once they’ve sat you’ll see a film start to form at the top that wasn’t there before. For me that film was made of really long bacteria all tangled together and tons of other life attached to and living around it.
This video doesn’t have stentors, but it is of my thickest biofilm, a lot of stentors were found in the same sample: https://youtu.be/T3Bbg-ObTok
Very cool! I have yet to encounter my first Stentor!
Really?!? Maybe you are keeping your samples healthier lol. I think they are decomposers and show up in my samples that are starting to decay lol.
Ooh, interesting to learn! I think it is because I only collected a few samples from the wild when I first got my microscope and still had no idea of how prepare the samples or what I was looking it, so if there was a stentor in there I probably did not notice…
I have practiced since then with fresh samples of things that I find around my apartment and things that I culture - and the occasional lichen. Tomorrow I will go find some samples from outside - I will get some biofilm from a pond too and look for stentor.
Oh cool, thanks for sharing! Biofilm is exactly where I tend to find them. I think they need a decent bit of oxygen, and if there is algae then they’ll eat the bacteria attracted to algae’s oxygen.
My most stentor populated samples were pond samples with a good bit of dirt and leaves that I sat on a shelf for a few days.
Once they’ve sat you’ll see a film start to form at the top that wasn’t there before. For me that film was made of really long bacteria all tangled together and tons of other life attached to and living around it.
This video doesn’t have stentors, but it is of my thickest biofilm, a lot of stentors were found in the same sample: https://youtu.be/T3Bbg-ObTok
Good luck microbe hunting!
Thanks for the details!
That video looks really nice! At first I thought it might be phase contrast, but I see from the description that you got creative. Nice job