i got a camera microscope recently and i'm obsessed and inspired...i even started a youtube channel documenting my discoveries!!!
top left - white thing with the tail and the eye is a rotifer, a micro-animal. the smaller shapes are diatoms, which are algae. they're on an aquatic plant and biofilm, which is a bunch of microorganisms, bacteria and decaying life stuck together
top right - a paramecium, a single-celled animal-like eukaryotic organism called a ciliate, surrounded by rocks and biofilm. it actually looks like this with the colors and glowing crystals, with polarized light!
bottom left - the thing that looks like 🦠 is a heliozoan (an ameboid organism that moves veryyyy slowly if at all), it impailed a euglenoid (a single-celled algae). the thing with the long neck is Lacrymaria olor (also a ciliate whose name means ‘tear of a swan’) hiding inside the abandoned shell of a testate amoeba. the lumpy green string is filamentous algae, originally i said cyanobacteria but it looks more like stylized diatoms that link together. this was 5 years ago! crazy!
bottom right - the red guy is a ciliate, i'm not sure what kind because i've never seen a red one before i found it! the spiky thing is a stylonycha, a ciliate whose cilia (little hairs you see on a lot of microorganisms) have fused together into legs. it has these all over its body, and can scuttle around in any orientation! the green banana is a desmid, a type of algae that has tiny pockets at the tips to store barium crystals so tiny they get knocked around by the water molecules themselves! and the thing in the almond shaped shell is a testate amoeba, an amoeba that lives in a shell! (an amoeba is a single celled organism of any kind-plant, animal, fungi-that move in a specific way, by morphing their bodies in strange abstract ways.)
