In a post last January I described an entertaining ciliate found in samples from Herons Head Park. I could not identify the species so I posted images and a movie of the critter and asked for nelp. The subsequent discussion touched on Dileptus, Lacrymaria, and Litononus as possibllities. All are members of the Class Gymnostomea [...]

My son Charlie and I headed out to Alviso yesterday to meet with Wayne as well as Craig and Anita from KQED. We hiked out to the weep along the trail to Drawbridge and messed around with microscopes and the new carp pole photography setup. The kite camera was grounded by a lack of wind. [...]

Microscope images often look flat and lack detail. There are two reasons for this: First, most microscope lenses have little depth of field, so only a thin plane is in focus; Second, most microscopic critters are transparent and their organelles are transparent, too.

This is a photomicrograph of a Cyanobacterial mat sample, taken from the [...]

On a delightful Sunday afternnon I decided to head down to Alviso to check the weep along the railroad tracks. This has been a fun site for its colorful and diverse community of microorganisms. I was curious whether our first winter rains had caused much change. As I approached the weep I could see that [...]

I have long been a fan of Flickr for its fine blend of image storage and social networking. Flickr’s approach of having an open API (subject to terms of use) has allows users to reference images stored on Flickr from their own www pages such as this blog. It has also spawned a number of [...]