My First Foray into Microbiology
Today, I started a new hobby. Biology has interested me for a long time and I finally went and bought a microscope. It’s a Bresser Student Microscope. It’s for kids but actually I think its pretty good. Bresser makes quality scopes.
After looking at the included specimens like plant cross sections and leg of a horse fly, I wanted to see actual living creatures.
I went outside in the dark finnish winter to a nearby forest and found a pond. I stirred the bottom mud with a stick and took a sample to a bottle that was included in the microscope kit. I took a second sample from a nearby tree trunk that had wet moss on it.
When I got home I took the caps of and put some water to the tube with moss. Then I took the pond sample and put a drop on a glass and a cover slip on top. This was actually hard as I don’t have a pipette. I tried to use straw but I took too much water at a time. I had to use paper towel to get the extra water off. Finally I had a sample to go look into.
The first time I looked at the sample, I only saw small debris floating around like rocks or something. Then I also saw these kind of water zones moving across and pushing debris around. I asked solveit (AI assistant based on Claude) and it said that those are evaporation currents. They were kinda cool but I didn’t see any life yet.
After I took another drop from the pond water, I went to look again. I looked around for a while and finally I noticed something that seemed to move. It was actually outside the cover slip in the water. I saw it had these hair like “legs” that were moving very fast. I thought this must be a living organism. I googled a bit and learned those flapping hairlike things are cilia. Solveit confirmed that this is probably the case. I wanted to document my findings and went to get my phone for its camera. After fumbling around trying to focus the camera and so on, I finally got the shot. I saw that the cilia weren’t moving anymore and that there was this extra stuff floating around it. I asked solveit and it told me that this is cell lysis, that the cell of the organism had bursted and its insides (possibly cellular organs) were floating outside. It was bit shocking and sad but then I figured that there are thousands if not millions of cells dying everyday even inside my body and that’s just how it is.
Anyways, this was my first encounter with living micro-organism under microscope and it was exhilarating! Now onto my next experiments, I still have that moss sample that I didn’t touch yet. Maybe I find some tardigrades if I’m lucky!