Difflugia Lanceolata

An amoeba who builds a shell from what he finds. Other amoebas build shells out of silicic acid, a form of biological silica. Diatoms also use silicic acid to build their shells. This particular species find small grains of quarts sand to build his, then glues them all together to form this shell that looks like a flint lance point. The amoeba then moves in and lives inside it. Talk about tedious.

This is my first successful Zerene stack of 9 images shot at about 400x magnification through my microscope.

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Interesting protozoa and lovely stack. Pretty sure focus stacking was originally developed for photomicroscopy.
Brian V.

Excellent work Micth.

Nice shot and stack Mitch.

Thanks Brian, Bas and Kurt. Your probably right Brian, although I don't know the history of stacking. I have been trying to get a good stack since I started in the Macro forum more than 5 years ago. I actually did a stack with Combine ZP using this same stack of images, and I am not sure if I like this one or that one better. They both came out OK, but the ZP one seems to be a little more stark, less shadow lines, while the Zerene stack is softer with more shadows. The ZP stack is probably closer to what the eye sees though. I'll add it here for comparison.

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nice shot...cool information...

Thanks for looking Rakesh. This is just one of about 30 species that builds shells of this type alone. There are many others that build different kinds of shells. And until a year ago, I didn't know any amoeba built a shell.