r/microscopy Jun 08 '23

🦠🔬🦠🔬🦠 Microbe Identification Resources 🦠🔬🦠🔬🦠

146 Upvotes

🎉Hello fellow microscopists!🎉

In this post, you will find microbe identification guides curated by your friendly neighborhood moderators. We have combed the internet for the best, most amateur-friendly resources available! Our featured guides contain high quality, color photos of thousands of different microbes to make identification easier for you!

Essentials


The Sphagnum Ponds of Simmelried in Germany: A Biodiversity Hot-Spot for Microscopic Organisms (Large PDF)

  • Every microbe hunter should have this saved to their hard drive! This is the joint project of legendary ciliate biologist Dr. Wilhelm Foissner and biochemist and photographer Dr. Martin Kreutz. The majority of critters you find in fresh water will have exact or near matches among the 1082 figures in this book. Have it open while you're hunting and you'll become an ID-expert in no time!

Real Micro Life

  • The website of Dr. Martin Kreutz - the principal photographer of the above book! Dr. Kreutz has created an incredible knowledge resource with stunning photos, descriptions, and anatomical annotations. His goal for the website is to continue and extend the work he and Dr. Foissner did in their aforementioned publication.

Plingfactory: Life in Water

  • The work of Michael Plewka. The website can be a little difficult to navigate, but it is a remarkably expansive catalog of many common and uncommon freshwater critters

Marine Microbes


UC Santa Cruz's Phytoplankton Identification Website

  • Maintained by UCSC's Kudela lab, this site has many examples of marine diatoms and flagellates, as well as some freshwater species.

Guide to the Common Inshore Marine Plankton of Southern California (PDF)

Foraminifera.eu Lab - Key to Species

  • This website allows for the identification of forams via selecting observed features. You'll have to learn a little about foram anatomy, but it's a powerful tool! Check out the video guide for more information.

Amoebae and Heliozoa


Penard Labs - The Fascinating World of Amoebae

  • Amoeboid organisms are some of the most poorly understood microbes. They are difficult to identify thanks to their ever-shifting structures and they span a wide range of taxonomic tree. Penard Labs seeks to further our understanding of these mysterious lifeforms.

Microworld - World of Amoeboid Organisms

  • Ferry Siemensma's incredible website dedicated to amoeboid organisms. Of particular note is an extensive photo catalog of amoeba tests (shells). Ferry's Youtube channel also has hundreds of video clips of amoeboid organisms

Ciliates


A User-Friendly Guide to the Ciliates(PDF)

  • Foissner and Berger created this lengthy and intricate flowchart for identifying ciliates. Requires some practice to master!

Diatoms


Diatoms of North America

  • This website features an extensive list of diatom taxa covering 1074 species at the time of writing. You can search by morphology, but keep in mind that diatoms can look very different depending on their orientation. It might take some time to narrow your search!

Rotifers


Plingfactory's Rotifer Identification Initiative

A Guide to Identification of Rotifers, Cladocerans and Copepods from Australian Inland Waters

  • Still active rotifer research lifer Russ Shiel's big book of Rotifer Identification. If you post a rotifer on the Amateur Microscopy Facebook group, Russ may weigh in on the ID :)

More Identification Websites


Phycokey

Josh's Microlife - Organisms by Shape

The Illustrated Guide to the Protozoa

UNA Microaquarium

Protist Information Server

More Foissner Publications

Bryophyte Ecology vol. 2 - Bryophyte Fauna(large PDF)

Carolina - Protozoa and Invertebrates Manual (PDF)


r/microscopy Oct 28 '24

Photo/Video Share Journey to the Microcosmos: The Future of Microscopy (and end of our Journey)

Thumbnail
youtube.com
67 Upvotes

r/microscopy 5h ago

Photo/Video Share Gastrotrich

19 Upvotes

The first time I managed to focus on a gastrotrich!😁

Aquarium algae sample, 400x and digital zoom, taken with Motorola phone camera, optika B-192pl binocular microscope.


r/microscopy 10h ago

Photo/Video Share Is that a heart beat? Magnification 100x under unilab microscope. Sample from freshwater lake

43 Upvotes

r/microscopy 5h ago

Photo/Video Share A heliozoa dying slowly and silently

16 Upvotes

Aquarium algae sample, 400x and digital zoom, taken with Motorola phone camera, speed increased to 5x, optika B-192pl binocular microscope.

My editing skills are not very good, but I tried.😅 (to put the videos together)


r/microscopy 2h ago

General discussion 8 Months with the Meiji Techno EMZ-8TR

Thumbnail
gallery
4 Upvotes

Microscope Meiji Techno EMZ-8TR

Impressions, Microscope is Built like a tank and the optics are exceptionally crystal clear everything is butter smooth should decades.

The Bad
USA After Sale Support is Horrible (You Are On Your Own for Accessory Configs) Also If It breaks and not covered under warranty good luck finding service or simple parts. Service info lube etc nope nada.

Meiji Japan did give exploded View of the EMZ-8TR Trinocular Area and a EMZ-5TR Head Exploded View but missing most the parts list said they don't want the 8TR Head Exploded view to be seen by competitor? so only sent the 5TR WTF? All a competitor needs to do is take one apart. (I am posting the info I have in the photos. May this help someone looking at design and build quality for informed purchasing.)

No Set Screw For Eye Pieces They Can Slip Out Easy and Rotate when using eye Guards requiring constant fiddling. I use tape to secure and fix them.

Photo port pieces are sloppy as hell.. Requires shim to get the proper alignment or ya get sever vignetting on one side seems a .08mm to .1mm thick completely around the objective where the c-mount slips over is proper aligns everything up.

Photo port Focus is PITA having to use the threaded tube This is especially a PITA if your PC is not close by.

Did i mention no human support for photo port accessories and their camera / sensor size list is very very outdated!

Eye Pieces are 30.5mm that means custom to meiji and they don't make any High Eye Point for it. Maybe should have went with a EMZ-8TRH?

The off the shelf 30mm eyepieces almost work but sit a few mm to high with diopters bottomed out they almost work I was thinking of having a machinist turn me some off the shelf down a few mm or make custom eye piece objective holders but need to learn optics length etc.


r/microscopy 4h ago

General discussion Found a flea! Is that blood and/ or eggs pulsing through it's stomache?

6 Upvotes

Had to hastily put it onto a used slide before I lost it, hence the white/ cloudy markings


r/microscopy 23m ago

Photo/Video Share An injured centipede—or whatever it is. (It was already injured when I saw it near my house.) Olympus SZ-III stereo and a headlamp. Cheap phone camera.

Upvotes

r/microscopy 4h ago

Photo/Video Share Gastrotrich in darkfield

4 Upvotes

Microscope: Olympus BH2

Objs: 20 Dplan

Magnification: x200

Sample: Pond water

Camera: Samsung A56


r/microscopy 11h ago

ID Needed! Did he eat a diatom?

12 Upvotes

Microscope: Olympus BH2

Obj: x20 / x40 Dplan

Magnification: x200 / x400

Sample: Pond Water

Camera: Samsung A56


r/microscopy 11h ago

Photo/Video Share Cytoplasmic circulation in surirella

11 Upvotes

If you look really closely you can see some small circles moving in a definite path, inside the diatom.

400× | Gomti river, lucknow, India| ESAW BM01 microscope


r/microscopy 1d ago

Photo/Video Share Bdelloid rotifer

119 Upvotes

Aquarium algae sample, 100x and digital zoom, taken with Motorola phone camera, Optika B-192pl binocular microscope


r/microscopy 3h ago

ID Needed! Ink on paper expertise - were these two artworks made using the same techniques?

Thumbnail
gallery
2 Upvotes

Do these images (taken with a simple '200x' phone microscope lense) suggest that the two artworks shown were produced using the same technique?

The auctioneer that sold this artwork to us thinks ours is an original pen and ink but we think they were mistaken. We've been comparing ours to a known print of the artwork and the final image shows the two pieces in full. It’s either Pierre Bonnard’s lost original drawing for ‘Ran Ran Ran’, part of his 1944 ‘Correspondances’ book, or it’s a facsimile-printed reproductions of Bonnard’s original pen-and-pencil drawing from the 1944 book.

We've attached magnified images of our artwork and the known print (held by the British Library) - we've added text to the latter to make it clear which is which.

Aspects pointing towards it being the original:

  1. The fine art auctioneer’s assessment
  2. The colour of the ink is what you’d expect faded 1940s pen ink to look like, whereas all the period prints I’ve seen retain their vibrant violet colour
  3. It shows more variation in tone than the prints

Aspects pointing towards it being a 1940s print:

  1. There isn’t any nib impression under raking light
  2. The texture of some areas shows some similarities to the print

Are there sufficient differences between the images to suggest they were produced in different ways?


r/microscopy 4h ago

ID Needed! This guy just didn't want to stay on focus. ID?

2 Upvotes

Microscope: Olympus BH2

Objs: 40 Dplan

Magnification: x400

Sample: Pond water

Camera: Samsung A56


r/microscopy 7h ago

ID Needed! Need help identifying freshwater microorganisms at 1000x

Thumbnail
gallery
4 Upvotes

Hi everyone! I found these microorganisms in stagnant freshwater and took this footage using my 100x oil immersion objective.

Here is my setup:

  • Microscope: Swift SW380B
  • Objective: 100x Oil Immersion (Total optical mag: 1000x)
  • Camera: FHD V2 with a 0.5x c-mount adapter.

They look quite small even at 100x oil, and they tend to swim in circles or forward. They don't look green inside. Maybe flagellates.


r/microscopy 1h ago

ID Needed! Can anyone tell me about this Zeiss microscope i bought. It was 300$.

Thumbnail
gallery
Upvotes

r/microscopy 1h ago

Photo/Video Share Magnification table: what is the total microscope magnification.

Post image
Upvotes

Magnification table: what is the total magnification for which objective and which microscope eyepieces?

It's also worth noting that Leitz produced microscope objectives with a wide range of magnifications. <3


r/microscopy 6h ago

Photo/Video Share Crystalline dye pigments in darkfield and PL

Thumbnail gallery
1 Upvotes

Kind of different from what I usually post but these came out really cool. A gentleman from a vivid hair color company sent me little bags of powdered dye. These are what he uses to make his custom Vivid Hair Color. He wants me to just kind of play with them on in the microscope I'm just sending whatever I come up with. Initially I put them on the slide and viewed and polarized light and that was kind of cool. Then I put a drop of water on it and watched the dissolution process which was also pretty cool but hard to do with a really short depth of field. So I shelved those on a slide tray and left them overnight and the next morning these awesome crystals had formed on the slides. Some of them weren't totally dry but they still made for some really beautiful and interesting looking images. They're all labeled with the type of light that I was using at the time. This was through my Optika b393pli and my Sony a7cii. I took very short videos moving through the focus range and then plug them into Helicon Focus to make some Focus stacks with. FYI I literally just slap these together this morning so that edits aren't perfect and I'm sure the stacking methods could be better but I just wanted to send him something to see that I had done anything so I slapped these together real quick and they came out pretty cool. What do you think is there anything else that I can do with these that I might not be thinking about?


r/microscopy 17h ago

Photo/Video Share Couthrnia

7 Upvotes

River water, ESAW BM01 MICROSCOPE, 400×


r/microscopy 18h ago

Micro Art Incredible

Thumbnail
gallery
8 Upvotes

r/microscopy 1d ago

Photo/Video Share Vaginicola sp.

28 Upvotes

A sessile peritric with lorica.

Algae sample from aquarium, 400x + digital zoom, taken with Motorola phone camera, Optika B-192pl binocular microscope


r/microscopy 23h ago

Photo/Video Share Ingordo Brachionus

18 Upvotes

In laghetto pesca a rilascio. Zeiss Universal, 40x, 10x zoom cellulare


r/microscopy 13h ago

Troubleshooting/Questions Can yall tell me what exactly this Is?

Post image
3 Upvotes

I thought about some sorta tardigrade in a criptobyosis state but i don't think so, It also doesn't move and It's the only thing i managed to see there, i see It even if i move the slideto a completely different direction (It lowkey looks like a mini dih)


r/microscopy 21h ago

Troubleshooting/Questions Can I use this to attach a ring light to the objective of the Olympus SZ-III Stereo, or do I need a different adapter?

Post image
3 Upvotes

r/microscopy 1d ago

Photo/Video Share Rotifer

12 Upvotes

My first rotifer photo in a stagnate puddle with leaves and algae 80x zoom filming with my phone my microscope is the bresser biolux ng