Some of the things you don't think about in your axolotl's tank

pete · Feb 2, 2008

I was trying to get the DIC microscope working for the lab and had some fun looking at my axolotl's tank water. I took some pictures and thought I'd share (All images are with 100x objective and scale bar is 10 micrometers). I don't know what they all are. But here's your aquarium on a cellular level. Maybe someone can identify them. The third picture was looking down on something's mouth, forth is a diatom, bottom of the fifth has an amoeboid critter, sixth is hair algae, seventh is Java moss.

Kaysie · Feb 2, 2008

Pete, GREAT pictures! It's definitely interesting to see, and a great demonstration of what 'healthy' water consists of!

pete · Feb 3, 2008

Yeah there was a lot of stuff in there. I was surprised at how many amoeba's I found. Unfortunately they just look like bubbly blobs and aren't too photogenic. Actually these 3-4 cell string things were most common to see, but they weren't too big and didn't do anything interesting.

pete · Feb 3, 2008

Figured, it would be appropriate to include the tank and axie (unfortunately, I could get a non-fuzzy one of him tonight.)

gr33neyes · Feb 3, 2008

Isn't it fascinating the things we share our world with but we don't usually see them, Thanks Pete.

John · Feb 3, 2008

Very interesting Pete. Thank you for sharing. What do the white lines represent? I was thinking scale but that can't be right given the size of those cells.

michael · Feb 3, 2008

Great pictures. When a tank has all of those little beasties in it you can tell it's in good shape.

pete · Feb 3, 2008

It's a scale bar corresponding to 10 microns. You can see how much variation in cell size there is in these organisms. The 3-4 cell strings were about 2 microns across. That's about the size of a budding yeast cell (single-celled fungi). Where as the third picture of this mouth thing (~30 microns), I think it is likely a ciliate (on the lower right you can see bumps on it which I think are cilia). Ciliates can be quite large, some species reach 2 millimeters (2000 microns).

Edit: for reference a generic mammalian cell is 15-30 microns, but this can vary a lot on cell type.

pete · Feb 3, 2008

I processed a few more images, and did some research on these bugs. I think the first and second image in the original post are a euglena (You can see it's flagella bunched up outside the lower left end of the cell.) and a desmid, repectively.

In this set the first is a series of three different focal planes (top, middle, bottom) through the same amoeba where you can see how amorphous they are as well as the phagocytic/vacuolar bodies, which are where he's digesting the bacteria in my aquarium.

Then there are two more pictures of different algae (a brown algae, I think. and then maybe another desmid species).

Then two more diatoms (one of which is quite large).

Lastly, some unknown thing that I thought looked like a caudate egg clump, so I included it.

John · Feb 3, 2008

Excellent, Pete. Thanks again. Can you take colour photos too?

pete · Feb 3, 2008

John said:
Excellent, Pete. Thanks again. Can you take colour photos too?

Sadly, I can't. Our camera is optimized for sensitivity, but doesn't do color. In general the setup isn't used for this purpose. So unfortunately I can't share the cool greens and redish-browns that I saw by eye.

Lisa · Feb 3, 2008

Ah, brings my microbiol rushing back...... very interesting, hope my tank has things like that in it

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Some of the things you don't think about in your axolotl's tank

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