My first observation

So, picking up the thread from my last post, I practically ran home with my half bottle of dirty water and, fairly trembling with anticipation I whipped out the microscope out of its carry-case, put a couple of drops of my precious water onto a clean slide making sure to pipette up a few of duckweed leaves with it, floated on a cover slip and slid the whole thing on my stage setting the lowest magnification (20x), looked through my ocular and saw...nothing.

I frantically rolled the slide all over the stage trying to locate anything interesting, but all I could see were a few very tiny critters zipping around all over the place so fast that I had no hope of focusing on one.

Out of sheer desperation I then refocused on the Duckweed thinking that if I found nothing that moved that I could study, I would study the leaves as closely as possible - and finally, just as I had given up, there it was! I saw a tiny movement out of the corner of my eye - something attached to the edge of the Duckweed leaf. Centering the field of view on it and switching from the 4x objective to the 10x objective I could see at last a slug-like creature, almost totally transparent.

It appeared to be slowly extending its head from a contracted position and then, as if by magic, it extended a pair of crown-like flaps which appeared to be ringed with tiny hairs that were rotating a high speed. I would have had no idea what this monster was had I not, quite coincidentally have seen its like on a Youtube video a couple of days before. It was a Rotifer, quite a common creature, but nevertheless an extremely interesting one.which I will write about in a future post.

In the meantime though here is a small video of my First Rotifer!

And a close-up of the little gal (these critters are always females!)

What can I say? At this point I was hooked!