Copepods are a large group of microscopic crustaceans. Unlike water fleas, I seldom take pictures of them because they are very fast and stop moving only for few moments making stacking process almost impossible. Copepods are very common in ocean plankton and you can see some really cool representatives on this wikipedia picture. They are also abundant in freshwater habitats and cyclopoida is the most famous order of them as it includes the Cyclop genus. However, the guy on the top picture is most likely Mesocyclops edax.
I made a couple of other stacks of this critter:
That's ventral view.- sorry for the missing antennae.
And a side view, which I made small because it's not of the top quality.
In the first picture and in the side view the bright white bands are muscles and other fibrillar structures.
When I made the pictures I thought they were cool. But there's a forum about photography through the microscope and macro photography (photomacrography.net) where people post a lot of amazing pictures and a noticeable microphotographer Wim van Egmond posted a copepod as well, and the details of legs are visible much better comparing to my attempts.
I also tried fluorescent photography of another copepod (the first one is now in the wallpapers) and got some interesting results:
That's not fluorescence but just a cyclops stained with fluorescent dyes in darkfield illumination
And just to compare, real fluorescence of this cyclop:
To be honest, I kind of lost interest in fluorescent photography, it's not as cool as seeing "normal" microscopic creatures, most of them are very gorgeous without any torturing techniques like staining with fluorescent dyes. But I'll be posting the rest of my unedited collection in the future when I have nothing else to take pictures of.
No comments:
Post a Comment