Foray part 2: The Moss Sample
In my previous post I detailed my entry into a new hobby: amateur biology with microscope. In this post I’m going to tell you about my second microscopy session.
Mossy bits
Continuing from where I previously left off, I took my moss sample from few days ago. I had put the moss in a small test tube filled with room temperature water, where it had sat still until now.
I took the moss out of the tube with tweezers and used my fingers to squeeze a small drop of water from it on a glass slide. The drop had small mossy parts floating in it. I carefully laid a cover slip on top of the slide using a particular tip I read online: touching the water with one side of the cover slip first and then laying the rest of the slip to leave out air bubbles.
I took a look at 40x magnification and instantly saw a lot of movement. YES!
I saw smaller and bigger organisms. Smaller ones had a dark dot clearly visible inside them. This was probably the nucleus of the cell, the part that stores its genetic information in DNA. Larger organisms were filled with smaller parts that might be organelles or food particles, I don’t know yet.
These organisms seemed similar to the ones I saw before. They were similar size, circular (roughly), and had similar movement. But this time I didn’t see cilia, the hair like things the organisms use for moving around. The organisms were moving around quite rapidly so I suppose they had smaller cilia around them.
They probably were unicellular (single cell) eukaryotes (have nucleus). These kind of organisms are called protist as they are not animals, land plants, or fungi. Protist that have cilia are called ciliate, so this is probably the closest I can get to identifying them.
The organisms were scattered around the glass. Some of them were hanging around mossy parts, possibly eating, and some just swimming around, maybe also eating but something so small (bacteria?) that I couldn’t see.
I looked at them first with 40x magnification, then 100x. I used a camera holder that was part of my microscope kit and took videos with my phone documenting what I saw. Using camera felt more ergonomic than just using my eyes as I didn’t have to lean in and squint.
Chainsaw Mouth
I was hoping to see something different from the moss sample. I cleaned up the glass slide and squeezed another drop of water, this time from rhizoids, the darker root-like part of the moss.
Bingo! There was something big there that was unlike anything I had seen before. It looked like a weird worm and was reaching around as if sniffing around. Then I was like, wait, does it have something rotating in its head? That’s what it looked like! It was sucking in water and particles around it with its dual motor mouth.
After a while it started to move around. It moved similar to Spider-Man, alternating sticking to something and then using its momentum to propel itself forward. I couldn’t believe my eyes.
This was a rotifer, specifically a bdelloid rotifer. Unlike ciliate, rotifers are multicellular and part of animals.
Fun etymology facts: rotifer comes from Latin and literally means ‘wheel-bearer,’ while bdelloid comes from Greek and means ‘leech-like’.