a little wild   (a small slice of wildlife)

In the past, I’ve been fooled (actually: I’ve fooled myself) into believing that I’ve found tardigrades, because I’ve wanted to find them pretty badly. This time, I’m sure, though.

I went to Moose Hill Mass Audubon and took three small samples home:

1. Moss from a dead tree trunk
2. Lichen attached to a piece of bark, lying on the ground
3. Moss from the top of a medium sized rock

I added water and waited a couple of hours, then looked at them under my (rather poor quality, but excellent value for the money) Tomlov electronic microscope. Please don’t confuse this with a scanning electron microscope :-).

The first two samples were completely devoid and bereft of any animal life I could find. The third one, the moss from the top of the rock, for some reason was utterly chock full of life. It was difficult to find a field of view that didn’t have some animal or the other. I don’t understand the reason for the difference, the samples were from similar-ish samples, not far from each other. I don’t know if this is a systematic issue, but next time I go exploring, I know I’m going to definitely look at the rock moss.

We’ll get to the tardigrades, please be patient. First, a movie with a flatworm (planarian) on the lower left. There’s also a green blob on the lower right that I’m unable to identify any further than “green blob”.

Here’s a spectacularly transparent worm, which I think is some sort of Nematode worm:

Here’s another one that gives some idea of all the activity going on. There’s at least one planarian, one tardigrade (not the best view of it, though) and a bunch of other creatures that I can’t pin down.

There were a lot of good views of the tardigrades, which were very common. I’m going to just share one. It’s translucent, so you have to look a little carefully, at center-left. You can see that it’s the right size, shape, and you can see its (adorable little) lobopods (aka, legs).

More videos can be found at https://www.youtube.com/@GauravShah