merismo microscopy

If you've ever wanted an insane amount of information on every protist genus ever, today is your lucky day! The International Society of Protistologists has uploaded a PDF of their extremely detailed illustrated guide, and it's all free for use and dissemination.

Even if protists aren't really your thing, it's worth scouring through some of the pages to look at the absolutely gorgeous micrographs and illustrations.

Sorry for the shaky footage (I really ought to get a stand for my phone) but would you believe it! It’s Noctiluca scintilans!

Satellite footage of sun bursts A single-celled organism (Staurojoenina assimilis) stained with flagella and cell-surface dye.

The hindguts of termites (where you can find these protists) are jam-packed with life, though perhaps a little too much life. Trying to separate out the DNA from a species without contaminant DNA getting in the way is a difficult task, and can sometimes lead to misleading results. Dyes like these could be used alongside a machine called a flow cytometer to separate out different cells, and hopefully obtain a clean "pool" of just one species (out of many).

Not too useful for Staurojoenina, which at a (relatively) whopping 130 micrometers is easy to manually collect. Here it is without the dye:

but certainly useful for protist species such as Tricercomitus divergens, which at 2-5 micrometers are often dwarfed by its bacterial neighbors:

There's actually two of them in this photo, believe it or not. I'll give you a hint- they are smaller than the squiggly lines (which are bacteria)

Here’s a reminder that the dino in dinosaurs is from deinos, meaning terrifying, whereas the dino in dinoflagellates (shown here) is from dinos, meaning whirling (cause their flagella whirl around, which is really the least interesting thing about them. Seriously, some of them have mini machine guns).

I remember when I first came across these weird star things under the microscope, I assumed they were some kind of pointy algae (blame the microscope for giving everything a slightly green hue... wait, is that why bacteria are always portrayed as green?) but it turns out they are amoebae with stretched-out pseudopodia, or “arms”.

It’s a bit more clear that they are amoebae in this photo:

See? Nice and wobbly, the way amoeba should be

Nostoc cyanobacteria (as well as some other species) form gelatinous colonies to protect themselves from being eaten and/or drying out. But this survival tactic doesn’t always work. Some start rotting, presumably the fault of other bacteria that have managed to break in, or perhaps from bacteriophages causing the cell contents to spill as they break out.

But not all hope is lost! There seems to be some kind of “escape pod” mechanism as a back-up: