I looked at little bits of different creatures that were fossilized in a rock I found in the cliffs at a park on the Lake Champlain shore in Essex, New York in summer. [MAP] We think the magnification on these microscope images is about 40X.
The circular thing in the first image is part of a tube worm shell, I think.
I'm not sure what this is, but the thing in the middle looks either like a backbone, or another tube worm shell.
I'm not sure what these pieces are. They seem to be part of tube worm shells and some other things, maybe plant matter.
This one looks like its got a tiny sea star in it and also bits of coral.
After that we could use the microscope with Photo Booth. That was cool because Photo Booth has a bunch of special effects (see last post). But we still get picture at only 640 X 480, which wasn't big enough.
My mom fiddled around with QuickTime, which in principle should be talking to the microscope if we got Photo Booth to work. She found a menu that helped: QUCIKTIME > PREFERENCES > RECORDING. The Video Source needed to be set to "Celestron Digital Microscope." The Qulaity needed to be set to "Device Native." Then we could record at 1.3 megapixels.
Then we can record video through QuickTime and the video comes out as 1280 X 1024 video, which is the size of image we want.
The only problem is that you get a video rather than a still image. The solution to this (so far) is to stretch the Quicktime playback window out to full size, and use Preview to make a screen shot of the window.
I still might need a small bit of help with it right now because this process is more complicated than I'm used to. But once we have the pictures we can put them in other programs, such as Corel Painter, and adjust the light and color tones in the picture. So this is a lot better than just 640 X 480 with some special effects.
Here is a picture from this morning of a shell that I picked up at the beach a while back. We looked it under the microscope. We were surprised to find these tiny shells attached to it instead of just little holes. the tiny shells seemed to be inside holes on the big shell. Some them look like clams and others of them look like snail shells. We never knew they were there before.
And here's some of the tiny shells close up:
(My mom did most of the work figuring out how to get the microscope functioning properly.)
I got a Celestron 44302 digital miscroscope for Christmas. It works pretty well, too, although we've only got it connected to Apple Photo Booth so far, and so the pictures are only 640 X 480 pixels until we get that fixed. Photo Booth has lots of special effects which I worked with on some of the pictures.
I am looking forward to taking more pictures once we figure out how to get the 1.3 megapixel pictures we are supposed to be able to get with this microscope.
One megapixel is 1,000,000 pixels. And 640 X 480 pixels = 307,200. 1.3 megapixels is 1,300,000 pixels. And so, to find out hom much bigger the pictures are that we are supposed to be able to get, we divide 1,300,000 by 307,200, and we get about 4 1/4. And so the pictures we should be able to get are 4 1/4 times bigger than what we are getting now!
The reason we are having a problem is that the computer isn't recognizing the microscope except when we use Photo Booth to get at it. It comes with software for Windows, but is suppsed to work right out of the box with Macintosh, which it doesn't.
This is a picture of a dime, but the letters are backwards because of the lenses in the microscope.
This is one of the traps on a Venus Fly Trap without any special effects. (Also, no special effects were applied to the dime.)
The Warhol effect used on the stem end of the Venus Fly Trap.
This is a picture of a flea stuck to a piece of tape using Photo Booth's x-ray effect.
Here are George Washington's eyes on the dollar bill, using Photo booth's x-ray effect.
Today I looked at a red water mite through a microscope in Mrs. Loher's room. I got it from the tank of pond water with an eye dropper. When I looked at it through the microscope, I noticed that it had long hairs to help it swim on three out of four of its pairs of legs. It has legs like a backswimmer water bug or like the bigger water bug that Mrs. Loher had last week.
It had a redish brown body, two mouthparts, and eight hairy legs. The back six legs have long hairs pointing backwards. I could see a rather large darker blotch in the middle and some little darker spots, but didn't have a clear view of its internal organs.
I think that maybe it can become a pest if areas become overpopulated with them, but in general their role in the ecology might be (I'm not sure if I'm right) to clean up plant and animal matter, or they may be parasites, since they look like ticks with long hairs on their legs.
It was kind of easy to see because it had the red color to it. Sometimes animals have the color red or orange as a warning color, for example red efts, which are poisonous. I don't know if these are poisonous or not.
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At home, we looked again at the picture of the fruit fly that we took the other day where it seemed like we could see its internal organs. What I thought we its internal organs under the microscope now look to me like a parasite living inside the fruit fly.
Today we took my puppy for a walk but ended up taking my cat for a walk, too.
We went down to where Hoisington Brook empties into Lake Champlain to look at the beaver lodge there. (
There seemed to be an area next to the Beaver lodge where the mud had been dug away from the bank. It looked like the beavers had used the mud from the dug up area to pile on the beaver lodge. The water was very high because it has been raining. The beaver lodge was very wet. The beaver lodge seemed like it had been soaked all over from the rain. There was also some ice by the edges of Hoisington Brook because it has been getting so cold in December.
From our livingroom we can see that there is a strong current leading a lot of the mud out into the lake and around the shore to the right. From the way the ice has formed on the surface, it looks like there is a partial beaver dam at the mouth of Hoisington Brook. Next to the beaver lodge there are branches with beaver tooth marks on it.
The Brook is very brown and muddy right now and the current is rushing.
Today, I looked at a fruit fly, two kinds of yeast, and a copepod under a microscope.
Last week, I poured a glass of cider and forgot about it. And my mom noticed it was bubbling. And so we let it bubble for five days so we could see the microorganisms under the microscope. A fruit fly fell in and drowned, and so we had a fruit fly in the cider sample.
Also, for comparison, we mixed some sugar, water, and bread yeast together and let it sit in a warm place for an hour and a half.
We brought both of these samples to school.
Fruit Fly
First, I looked at the fruit fly through the microscope, since it was bigger, and therefore easier to find, than the yeast. Here are some pictures of what I saw:
Hairs on a fruit fly wing:
The insides of the fruit fly as seen through its wing:
. . . and closer . . .
The fruit fly was interesting because you wouldn't expect to be able to see so many things on a fruit fly. I didn't know it had hairs on its wings or that it had antennae that looked like little clumps of hairs. I saved the slide to look at it more later.
Two Kinds of Yeast
Then I looked at the yeast. As far I could tell, there was a lot more yeast in the bread yeast mixture than in the cider. We tested the PH of each mixture. The cider had a PH of about 4.5 and the bread yeast mixture had a PH of 6.
Both kinds were easier to see when we stained it with iodine. Here's a video of what yeast looks like under the microscope. You could only really see the yeast under the highest power (400X) of the school microscope.
Copepod
There is a giant water bug in Mrs. Loher's room at school in an aquarium. I put the giant waterbug and some water in a beaker to look at. I also noticed some microscopic white creatures in the water with it, so I got one with the eye dropper and put it on a microscope slide and looked at it under the microscope.
The creature was a copepod. It looks like a shrimp with an oval shaped body, no legs, a tail, and four little sensor hairs or something coming off of its tail. It also had antennae. Here is a video of it plus a still image from the video.
I recognized it was a copepod and we confirmed it by looking up copepods on the Internet. I had seen copepods before on a DVD series called The Blue Planet by David Attenborough. It's about ocean wildlife in places like deep sea trenches or just very deep down in the ocean. But copepods also live in fresh water and they can even live in soil.
Next time I probably want to see if I can find any water fleas (which only look like fleas), and also learn how to measure the size of microscopic creatures.
I. In Mrs. Loher's room I looked through the microscope at some of the water from the tank with the water bug. At first I had the microscope focused so I could see the cells of the duckweed which looked like -- instead of being squares -- they looked like circles. And then I noticed that whatever the little creatures were in the water, they could somehow move around through what looked like jet propulsion and had small little tails. I could faintly see what looked like their internal organs, but it was kind of hard.
II. There are two beaver lodges by my house. One is right by the mouth of Hoisington Brook, and the other is in a swamp out back of and old red house near us. We can see the one by the brook from our living room. The one by the brook washes away sometimes when the brook gets too strong. Last spring I saw one of the beavers probably from the swamp over by the marina. I have also seen muskrats and minks and many other creatures near the marina.
