Difflugia - Testate amoeba

This is a species of Testate amoeba, called Difflugia. He builds his house out of small sand particles and other debris, like diatom shells, that he attaches with an organic glue made from silicic acid that he produces.

Here is the video of this little wonder, and mercifully under 5 minutes long. If you have watch any of my previous videos on YouTube, I would like your opinion of this one, as I used some software I have had on my computer since I built it a couple months ago, but never had the time to play with until now. This is only the second video I have edited with it, but it's not as hard as I thought it would be. I am using Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 now and in my opinion at least, the quality of the program shows through over the $59 special I was using.

On to the stills. The first three shot using a 20x Nikon Plan APO objective for a mag of about 200x or so. The last one using a Nikon 40x Plan Achromat.

1. I posted another thread the other day with two species of Testate Amoeba, one a Difflugia like this one. However, there is a difference between them and I am not sure if it means they are different sub-species, or it's natural, but this one has a three leaf clover door, where the one from the other day had a 4 leaf clover door.

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Cool..these look very 3D

Thanks Kurt. If you can, watch the video, it's really hard to get a grip on the perspective. That 3 leaf clover thing is at the bottom of a jar looking shell. These shots are focused down through the shell at that opening, so it's really confusing.

The stills are pretty neat, but I watched the video, and that is amazing.

There looks like a guest appearance at 39 seconds from a smaller creature, running in and out of shot.

You have a great laid back naration style.

Thanks Bas, yes, video is so much more entertaining and shows more details about the structure of these microbes. Stills, with just the brightfield equipment I have is very limiting. There are other options that make much better still shots, but it's too expensive, or not available at all for my scope.

This was a particularly clean drop of water. Usually there are all kinds of other critters or junk floating around that gets in the way. The one you saw was one of the stage crew that got into the frame by mistake.

like a microscopic snail, interesting find.

Thanks Toby, yes, a snail with many feet. It took some getting use to to realize they are gripping the glass of the slide, and walking on it. They don't like to go free swimming, they act like a cat in freefall.