Even Underwater Plants Have Scale Insects

I know they don't look like much, and it took me hours of observation to figure out that they were not part of the plant. I guess it was when I saw them on several different species that I realized they were something besides warts or whatever. And then I saw them move in a video, as I was scrubbing the timeline. You think snails are slow? These guys make snails look like the Indy 500. And they even have an ant analog that comes by and cleans them off, although not on purpose.

1. 100x. A hair algae I scraped from some rocks in the Mississippi River.

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neat series, Mitch

Amazing shots Mitch.

Thanks Dean and Bas. I am constantly amazed by what I find in a drop of water.

Wow

Hi Peter. Glad you liked it.

You sure they're bugs? I don't see their legs...

Tiberius, they don't have legs. They kind of just wiggle a little bit. If you saw video of them, you could see them move from side to side, like the slow motion twist. There isn't much about them online. I can't even find their name. They are bugs though, and not part of the plant.

Maybe you can't imagine the scale of these things. For instance, the algae, bugs and all are simply invisible to your eye. What you see in these shots here, imagine each frame as one acre. Then the single drop of water spread under a coverslip on the slide would be 10,000 acres.

Interesting stuff- good captures
Brian V.

canonloader wrote in post #13451059
Tiberius, they don't have legs. They kind of just wiggle a little bit. If you saw video of them, you could see them move from side to side, like the slow motion twist. There isn't much about them online. I can't even find their name. They are bugs though, and not part of the plant.

Maybe you can't imagine the scale of these things. For instance, the algae, bugs and all are simply invisible to your eye. What you see in these shots here, imagine each frame as one acre. Then the single drop of water spread under a coverslip on the slide would be 10,000 acres.

I can understand the scale. I'm just saying that they don't look like insects. Couldn't they be some single celled critters?

Hey Brian, thanks for looking.

Tiberius, I can't answer for sure. I have not even been able to identify them yet. They are not insects in the common definition. I used that in the title because they inhabit the same niche underwater that scale insects do above water. I have been seeing them almost since the day I got my microscope though, so they are extremely common. Also, the distinction between plant and animal is not so cut and dried as it is in our macro world.

From their size, I would guess they are single celled, and from the way they move, they are not plants. They may be related to free swimming euglena though, as the golden colored things inside them might be chloroplasts or chlorella. There are green versions, seen here inside the plant cells, and gold versions, which may be whats inside the scale things. The gold is quite common in underwater life like diatoms.

Next time I find a nice healthy crop of these bugs, I will take some time lapse footage of them to show how they move.

simply great piece of work - its amazing what you all come up with.

Thanks Starky, it's an amazing world we live in.

very good series Mitch!

Hi Martin, thanks for looking.