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Project Noah Nature School
Class: Bacillariophyceae
Found along shoreline of man-made lake. State Park in SW Pennsylvania.
Spotted on Aug 29, 2013
Submitted on Sep 4, 2013
5 Comments
Hi William_Dembowski,
Thank you for the link. Its nice to know about your project too. I also, usually ID things by giving short descriptions in google image search. I think, that will be one of the most practical ways available.
Hi Namitha,
Good luck with your project. It sounds very similar to one that I am conducting to show a correlation between the presence of diatoms & desmids and the pH levels of their watery habitats. I am sorry to say there are few sites that I regularly visit for identifying micro-organisms. They are all arranged by their genera names so you must, in effect, know what you are looking for before you can find it. What I usually do is Google for images using a brief description and then follow the path of anything that looks similar.
Having said all that, here is one site that you may find useful for algae:
http://algalweb.net/indext-ab.htm
Hi William Dembowski,
I saw the blog. Thank you so much for sharing the technique.The methods you are using to capture these images is wondeful. The closest equipment that I have, is a compound microscope with 10X and 45X magnification, through which I spotted some Scenedesmus algae.For me, it is a wonderful equipment, but the main problem I face is, it's very difficult to identify the different life forms I see through my microscope. Could you suggest some sites which have the list of different algal forms in ponds and other water bodies. I wish to get this information, because I thought of doing a survey on the 'micro life' in the ponds and water bodies near my house. To see how the diversity vary based on pollution and artificial fertilizer levels. I started doing this project, but couldn't go further with it as I couldn't identify many of the organisms I saw through the microscope.
Hi Namitha - Thanks for the kind words. I use a Leica CME microscope and a Moticam 10 digital microscope camera. The single most helpful technique that I can offer is covered briefly in my blog at:
http://zone-vx.com/blog/2013/03/10/focus...
If you have any questions I will be glad to answer them.
Hi William Dembowski,
All your microscopic spottings are really amazing. What technique did you use to take this pictures. Very interesting.