A Living Daphnia - Stills And Video

This Daphnia was caught in my microbe aquarium by dipping a small cup into the surface water near the edge and letting the incoming water suck any microbes into the cup.

I then used a Nikon Zoom Dissecting microscope to view the cup and use a large pipette to suck him up then transfer it to a depression slide. I put a coverslip over it and transferred the slide to my Nikon Fluopot scope to view and record him.

He went back into the aquarium in good shape when I was done recording this video and some stills. These are all about 100x magnification and the video has some scenes at 200x, 100x and as low as about 5x.

Here's the video link. It clearly shows his internal organs, heartbeat and blood circulating around the body. One of my better videos, and I even found it interesting.

1. The head end, with his compound eye, antenna and other organs.

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You're really taking amazing and very interesting photos...I follow you

Glad you like them. Sometimes, the videos are better than the stills.

Lovely series- the pano worked well
Brian v.

Thanks Brian. I probably should have planned for it better though. The simple Canon stitch program did a fine job of it, to my surprise.

Cool shots Mitch. The pano is great.

great work, from Google images I can see that it is a male.

Thanks Kurt and Toby. I was thinking it was a male, but had not found a decent comparison yet. My usual ID page for these things was down all day yesterday, and still is, darn it.

The last one I posted here was full of eggs and easy to tell it was female. I need to do more research on these guys, cause I can get some decent views of the internal organs, but don't have a clue what they are.

nice series...i used to feed this to the newly born goldfish in my fish tank...never seen them so close...tfs...

Thanks Rakesh. The video is even better, shows the organs at work. I guess you can see them here, but it highlights them more when things are moving.

neat series, Mitch - I liked the video

Thanks Dean, this video did come out pretty nice.

Fascinating presentation, Mitch.

I wish I could see the video, but I live in a rural area that does not have DSL yet, so I have a wireless connection (and not a very good one), so video streams simply don't work

Interesting stuff!

Thanks John. I'm sorry you can't see the video, it's actually nicer than the stills. It is a big movie though, about 124Mb. It would take forever to download.