Having way too much fun

With the new microscope.

Amoeba:

I saw three on this one slide. They seem to prefer living in the gunk near the outflow of my aquarium filter.

Green brush alga:

Rotifer:

Euglena, perhaps.

I’m not entirely confident of the identity. The green specks could be chloroplasts, making it a euglena, or they could be food vacuoles from eating green stuff.

Ciliates:

Diatom:

Fungus ascus? I saw several of these little sacks.

“Sun animalcule”, or Heliozoa.

These relatives of testate amoeba, so-called because produce shells, called tests. (So an intestate amoeba is not an amoeba that died without leaving a will.)

Not sure what this ciliate is, but it’s relatively large.

Another ciliate.

Oscillatoria, I think.

The green filament suggests a blue-green alga, but its tip slowly waved back and forth, which suggests some species of Oscillatoria.

I’m having just too much fun here. But life is getting back at me for it: I still have the headache, which is acting more and more like a chronic sinus headache, and my butt still hurts where I pulled a muscle while cleaning up the room for the quarantine tank. Perhaps because I had a lot of snow to shovel today:

Kind of screws up hiking and geology, but the microscope is keeping me entertained, and plans are coming together for the annual geology trip.

Meanwhile, the quarantine tank shows no signs of cycling even after a week and a half. I’m wondering if I put in too much ammonium chloride, and so I changed out part of the water and replaced it with water from the display tank.