at 100X Oh, how I wish my microscope camera had better resolution! This rotifer was so fascinating to watch as it swam through the water on the microscope slide. At 100X it was possible to see the cilia at the top waving rapidly. These animals were first seen by Anthony van Leeuwenhoek, the Dutch inventor of the microscope, in the 1670's. He found them in the water from his cistern (yes, he probably drank millions of them!). He called them "wheel animalcules" because they spin or rotate as they pull themselves through the water with their cilia. They also pull in small bits of food with the cilia. One of my favorite rotifers is bright orange and it inches along the slide like an inchworm! I find them in the birdbath in my yard each summer. To see this animal moving, go to the Videos section on the site map on this website.
- a green alga No, this is not the rock band from the 1970's! I thought it was funny when I was in high school that a band would name itself after a pretty green alga! Spirogyra is sometimes called "Mermaid's Hair" or "pond silk" because the strands can grow very long.
is a single-celled organism, a protist (100X). The bell-shaped cell is ciliated and stalked. The organism eats by waving the cilia and pulling food particles into the cell openings (being single-celled, it has no "mouth"). The following high-magnification photos were taken with a Wolfe 1.3 megapixel digital compound microscope, unfortunately, that resolution does not allow for sharp, high resolution photos. The photos in the science catalog sure didn't look like these! Hmmm, it makes me wonder if they really were taken with this kind of microscope! ;)
