An Unidentified Microscopic Larvae

I found this guy in a jar of pond water sent to me by a friend in Tennessee. I have had him for about a week and seen him swimming around in there, but was unable to catch him with a pipette. Today, I used a white ice cube tray to pour out some of the water from the jar into about half the cube sections. I could not see if I had got him poured out until I put the tray under my Nikon Stereo scope and checked, and sure enough, he was in the first section.

Being in a much smaller area made it easy to suck him into the pipette. I used a 5ml pipette with a short piece of aquarium air hose attached to the end of the tube. This was enough to get him pulled up, then I transferred him to a slide with a depression in it. Because of his size, quite large enough to see with the naked eye, there was no need to use a coverslip.

Identification Update; It turns out to be a Chaoborus punctipennis. A glassworm or phantom midge larvae. They are a predator of mosquito larva and the four black kidney shaped things are air sacs that he uses to control his depth in the water.

After looking at the stills, you owe it to yourself to watch the video of this guy. It's amazing.

1. This is the head end. Think of the movie Predator. 4x.

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looks alien, but very cool

Yeah, I have never seen anything at all like this. If you haven't watched the video, it's even more alien than these stills. LOL He's a little bit large for a microscope though, An MP-e would do a great job on this guy.

Interesting larva !
brian v.

Damn that is cool!

One of the coolest things I've ever seen.

Thanks Brian, Crimzon and Mark. As it turns out, he is even cooler than I thought too, it's a Chaoborus punctipennis. A glassworm or phantom midge larvae. They are a predator of mosquito larva and the four black kidney shaped things are air sacs that he uses to control his depth in the water. An amazing critter.

Cool stuff Mitch. Only 4 - 5x? I can shoot it with the MPE65 then.

Thanks Kurt, no, That is the power of the Objective lens I use. Then there is a projector lens and two stacks worth of tubes, so it's really 4x times 10 or so. But, this guy was easily large enough that an MP-e would get some very nice shots of him. On my scope, even 20x was too much. So, it might be worth a closer look at a drop of water some time.

amazing shots!!!

beautiful tail fan.

Thanks for looking John and Toby. Yeah, the tail fan is very cool. I have never seen anything that actually looked and were built like real feathers on a larvae before. The more I look at this thing, the more I am in awe of his complexity. The video shows much more detail and how he's put together much better than these stills. You can see muscles working and his structure that holds him together and gives it stiffness, like a skeleton. He's even in sections with joints.

That's cool, Mitch!!

When a discussion came up yesterday about macro magnification and micro, I pointed them to this thread!

Thanks Tony, and one of my best examples too.

What do you think of this guy? Isn't he cool?

Yeah Mitch, and an amazing amount of detail in there!