Microscopy Thread

[Fish Fan]

Very cool! I'm sure it's posted above But what are you using for a 'scope please?

 

[EnterName]

Very cool! I'm sure it's posted above But what are you using for a 'scope please?

I'm using a Leica/Leitz DMRB. Be warned, DIC-capable microscopes are very expensive. You could get a very nice new tank with equipment for that money

 

[ISpeakForTheSeas]

1. Crustacean
2. Close-up of a Clownfish egg
3. Cthulhu (probably Sabellidae or Serpulidae)
4. Diatoms and Dinoflagellates (probably some Ostreopsis sp. and Licmophora sp.)
5. Wormy-Thingy (unknown, maybe Polychaete larvae or Nectochaete?)
6. (Ghost?) Flatworm

1 is a Tanaid (the crab-claw style gnathopods are the tell there); 5 is a Dinophilid worm (tiny CUC):

Tanaids are generally scavengers, eating detritus/herbivores, though a few eat worms and copepods;

 

[EnterName]

1 is a Tanaid (the crab-claw style gnathopods are the tell there); 5 is a Dinophilid worm (tiny CUC):

Thank you so much! I will edit the post and give credit to you for identifying. I assume it is year long experience, but if you have any tips on where I could learn you identification skills, I would love to hear them maybe some books, or websites?

Would you mind checking out post #39. These creatures are interesting as well

Thanks again! I really love to know what I'm seeing so I can read about all these fascinating little creatures.

 

[ISpeakForTheSeas]

Thank you so much! I will edit the post and give credit to you for identifying. I assume it is year long experience, but if you have any tips on where I could learn you identification skills, I would love to hear them maybe some books, or websites?

Would you mind checking out post #39. These creatures are interesting as well

Thanks again! I really love to know what I'm seeing so I can read about all these fascinating little creatures.

Haha, yeah, a lot of experience goes into it (I sadly don't have anywhere near as much time to study up on critters as I used to, so I'm getting rusty), but I have a bunch of resources I use (I'll link them below).

Unfortunately, microscopic organisms are a definite weakness of mine for ID's, so other than agreeing that the one seems to be a larval polychaete of some kind, I'm afraid I'm not much help there at the moment (I used to refer people to taricha for microscope ID's, but they're no longer active).

My resources (my list is probably missing a few still):

Now, the below will probably be a "little" overwhelming - if you want help figuring out what to use for your specific purposes, feel free to ask and I can point you in the right direction. I've probably forgotten some sources/databases (I added a few this time around), but the below is more than enough for most things.


For general learning:

For just general research stuff, Google search (not Google Scholar Search) is your friend as it can help you find links on the following sites (assuming no special academic/research access and that you want to avoid paywalls as much as possible):

-Research Gate
-Academia.edu (you need a free account to read the stuff)
-JSTOR (you need a free account to read the stuff - they've got a lot of older stuff, but I've found some of the older stuff is really good/contains a lot of detail)


These next ones are good (sometimes really good) but more likely (sometimes very likely) to have paywalls or require access to an article through an institution - sometimes you can still get free articles or good info from just the abstract they show on the page, but other times you can't:

-PubMed
-Springer
-Elsevier
-ScienceDirect
-Tandfonline
-BioMedCentral
-Springer
-Frontiers
-Academic.oup
-Nature
-MDPI
-SciELO - Brazil

And this definitely doesn't cover every site out there - these are just some of the more common ones that pop up for me.

For info on fish/inverts (profiles on each), the list below is pretty good (again, definitely not complete - a notable one I know is missing is Inverts.WallaWalla.edu)

Yeah, none are perfect by any means, but here are some that are generally pretty good (I'm sure I'm forgetting a few; I left a few that are unlikely to be relevant or just don't contain much info out on purpose):

-LiveAquaria (hobbyist oriented)
-Saltcorner (hobbyist oriented)
-JungleDragon
-FishBase/SeaLifeBase
-Fishes of Australia (Museums Victoria)
-Mexican Fish
-Florida Museum of Natural History
-Indian River Lagoon Species Inventory
-Shorefishes (Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute)
-Seaunseen
-WildSingapore
-Kwajalein Underwater
-NCFishes (rarely pops up, but good for some species found on the Eastern US north of Florida)
-INPN (it's French, but comes in handy sometimes)
-Frogfish.ch (frogfish specific, but by far the best frogfish technical info site around)

Edit: New I'd forgotten a few:
-MarineBio (Marine Conservation Society)
-Reef Life Survey
-The Online Guide to the Animals of Trinidad and Tobago (I'm not sure if you can purposefully search through these files on their site somehow, but it comes up pretty often with Google searches - it's species profiles compiled by The University of the West Indies at St. Augustine, Trinidad, and Tobago)
-Eprints@CMFRI (similar to the above, I can't get it to let me search their library on their site, but it comes up pretty often with Google searches - there are a number of species profiles compiled by the Open Access Institutional Repository of Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute)

And some more in the link below:

Looking for a list of Marine fish

Does anyone know a good website or place that has a really nice selection of fish or just information about fish. I seem to constantly find new fish and never know the names. LiveAquaria has a okay selection but they are still missing some fish. Just looking for info with pictures and names...

www.reef2reef.com

India Biodiversity Portal (IBP)
Invert E Base
Lizard Island Field Guide (lifg.australian.museum)

Just to add for anyone interested, a page with a bunch of sea slug related links, including the Sea Slug Forum, which is good enough that I've also listed it below:

Slug-Related Web Sites (Elysia and others) – Solar Sea Slug Blog

solarslug.info

The Sea Slug Forum - Home Page

Edit: As a tip for researching specific topics, using a normal Google search and adding the words "google scholar" to the end of the search usually pulls up a lot more/better results (it pulls basically all of the actual Google Scholar results as well as a bunch that wouldn't show up there while usually getting rid of the less accurate/reliable sites).

 

[EnterName]

Maybe not the most beautiful video I have ever taken, but I cannot remember having seen one of those guys in my tank before, and just needed to record it before it got out of my sight

(My best guess is that it's a Trachelocercid ciliate)​

 

[sixty_reefer]

I follow Journey to the Microcosmos on YouTube, It’s a great channel very informative and full of fascinating microscopy content.

 

[EnterName]

I follow Journey to the Microcosmos on YouTube, It’s a great channel very informative and full of fascinating microscopy content.

I like James Weiss very much and have also bought his book "The Hidden Beauty of the Microscopic World". You can see the Trachelocercid ciliate I posted #46 in his video about samples he got from a German coral vendor:

 

[sixty_reefer]

I like James Weiss very much and have also bought his book "The Hidden Beauty of the Microscopic World". You can see the Trachelocercid ciliate I posted #46 in his video about samples he got from a German coral vendor:

I haven’t seen that one before, now you’ve sent me down a rabbit hole researching Chlamydodons and their feeding habits.