Euchlanis dilatata - A Rotifer

Not really a rare rotifer, but one I see very seldom, maybe cause they live at the surface of the bottom silt and mud, where there is a layer of decaying vegetable matter and the other microbes that eat it. Euchlanis dilatata, like all Rotifers is a filter feeder, mostly, they eat bacteria floating in the water, and you simply would not believe how much bacteria microbes are floating in all water, but they also eat one celled Algae, which you will see in the video linked below.

This Rotifer and the others on the slide, were found in a single drop of Mississippi River water which my brother collected for me last week There were at least 15 or 20 others on the slide, and I am sure many more in the one gallon sample, along with many other amazing and unique life forms only seen when magnified a hundred times or more.

The video.

The stills, all using a 10x objective for a real magnification of about 100x at the sensor. These were also cropped about 45%.

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Fantastic!

Thanks Russ. They are very cool. Not big enough to see with the naked eye, but almost, at 0.2mm. And always interesting to watch them going about their daily lives.

these are great mitch!
not drinking any more water! LOL

Thanks Denis. These guys are beneficial bugs. They are used at sewage plants to break down the solids in the water, and do away with the harmful bacteria. They do it in the simplest way, by eating and digesting it in their stomach acid. But rotifers themselves are harmless and would not make you sick and are everywhere in nature. In fact, I have looked at a lot of tap water and there has never been anything in any of it that you can see. That doesn't mean that there is not chemicals in it, that you can't see, but I have never found any bugs in any of it. Which is a relief. LOL

Awesome!

Great work Mitch.

Thanks for looking guys. It was nice finding a new and different rotifer, after the last several months of just Philodina, which you can see next to the main character in images #3 & 4 above. And those are fairly large rotifers in themselves, when compared to what is usually in the water with them.

Mitch, Nice series.

Wonderful series
Brian v.

Thanks Shek and Brian.

Great series and quite nicely captured.
Ishrani

Thanks Ishrani. I started shooting Macro, but just got too old and out of shape to be rolling in the grass, so I went to shooting birds. Now I am too old and out of shape to chase the birds. So I got a microscope and can sit at my desk and find whole worlds in a jar of water.

But I got to tell you, taking pictures through a microscope is a whole other experience altogether. It took 2 years of almost daily testing and practice to get these images, and there are people out there that make mine look like holiday snapshots taken by an amateur.