How did I record this?
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Please enjoy this video made using my Razer Phone 2 and Nikon Eclipse E200 Student Microscope at 40x, 100x and 400x (4x, 10x, and 40x objectives). The Razer Phone 2 is recording at 2x magnification, I don't know if this is comparable to an image presented at 80x, 200x and 800x magnification, but it looks great! The Razer Phone 2 was set to record at 60fps at 4K resolution.
Darkfield
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The background is black because I used a microscopy technique called "darkfield" (or dark-field/dark field). This was achieved with a 3D-printed darkfield conversion kit for the E200 purchased on eBay.ca. The kit consists of a cylindrical insert for the Nikon 1.25 Abbe Condenser and various filters. I used two of the supplied filters, one on the top of the insert, and one at the bottom and this was the result. I think it turned out great, don't you?
Contents of the video
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I collected pond water in a 500 mL plastic water bottle from Milliken Park in Scarborough (Toronto) Ontario, Canada on Friday May 31, 2019. This was my first time collecting pond water. Be very careful and very safe if you decide to do this.
This water had sat in a pyrex container for 1 week (now June 7, 2019) and although it looks like most of the plants have been eaten, predators remain. I saw this small creature moving at the bottom of the pyrex container, it looked like a moving piece of solid fish waste (fish feces). This is what it looked like under the microscope. It turns out, this is a beautiful beast. The pond beast was returned alive to the pyrex container to fight it out amongst the other pond life.
UPDATE: Sunday June 9, 2019
The pond beast in this video is most likely a dipteran larva with 4 prolegs (2 anterior, 2 posterior):
midge.cfans.um...
www.waterbugke...
dept.harpercoll...
www.researchga... (sort of a bad resource)
Wet mount technique
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We learned how to wet mount microorganisms in BIO173 during the first semester of Biotechnology at Seneca College in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Now having completed the first year of Biotechnology at Seneca, I am preparing for my first semester in a new program--Biomedical Science at York University. It feels like summer already, and I'm wet mounting pond life at home.
This is one of the easiest wet mounts to perform, it requires pond water, a blank slide, cover slip, ideally a Pasteur pipette (or other small dropper you can find at the pharmacy) and maybe a Q-tip (for cleanup).
Use the Pasteur pipette or dropper to collect (aspirate or submerge and cover) pond water along with a small amount of green plant material. Why? This helps trap those little single-celled organisms so they aren't able to swim around the entire slide! Place one drop on the slide (or 2 to 3 equidistant drops) and properly place a single cover slip on top of the water droplet (or a single cover slip per drop if you have used more than one drop). If you have excess water you can use a Q-tip to carefully clean up the slide. You should now have performed one to three wet mounts! Yay!
Make sure stay clean! Wash your hands (and any other equipment) that has come into contact with pond water. Soap for your hands and equipment, or if you have any, isopropanol (isopropyl alcohol) should work well enough for the equipment.
Music
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"A Glorious Dawn" "by" Carl Sagan
"Under the Milky Way" by The Church
"The Grid" by Daft Punk