#lfkulture

Just a little tardigrade (waterbear) swimming around for your Wednesday needs.

I want to say this is a litonus, but it seems a little big. If it is, this protozoa is found in fresh water and, in this case, activated sludge. It's carnivorous and eats other bacteria and protozoa like stalked cilitates. I like seeing its cilia move on the upper surface.

A vorticella (right) and a mosquito larva from my rain barrel. I was very happy with this seeing as I have never captured a vorticella in the wild outside of the wastewater treatment plant. In the bottom picture you can see some diatoms hanging out there as well. All of these things were hanging in and around an exoskeleton of some sort.

This beauty comes from the bottom of my rain barrel. Most likely the remaining exoskeleton of a fly larva or an aquatic beetle. There were a number of exoskeletons from this sample, and all of them were interesting in their own way. This one was the most visually disturbing one that I came across; the others were little islands of other inhabitants. I’m always amazed how much detail from these exoskeletons remain intact. I guess they are skeletons after all.

These were taken from the wastewater treatment plant’s aeration basins.

While raking the yard I came across a fallen oak branch that had some black jelly roll fungus on it. The top left is the undersurface of the fungus, while the other pictures are of the upper surface where its spores are produced. The star-looking thing in the top right picture might be an oak trichome, or oak hair, if you will. 

I found a dead weevil in some rice the other day. And you can say “Ewwww” about it, but weevils are major pests for grains and cotton almost worldwide. It’s not wholly unusual to run across one somewhere. However, as far as beetles go, I always thought weevils were rather cute. 

Let’s take a moment to look at the head of a water flea (daphnia). Despite any initial belief, the big black thing is actually its compound eye (only one). Below the eye are little squiggles (scientific term) that are the optic nerves and eye muscles that lead to the brain, which is really a cerebral ganglion. So the eye of a daphnia literally is bigger than its brain.