Dictyostelium discoideum, A Slime Mould

 A friend donated to me a culture of Dictyostelium discoideum, a cellular slime mold. I have had great fun watching its various stages right through to forming fruiting bodies. Ours were fed on oats but 'in the wild' they live on the bacteria in soil.They first exist as separate single-celled amoebae, but after consuming all the bacteria in their area they proceed to stream together to form a multicellular organism. These features make them a valuable tool for studying developmental processes and also for investigating evolution of multicellularity. Long thought to be a type of fungus, it has recently been shown that slime molds in fact bear no relation to fungi. They are now classed as Mycetozoa. (Images taken with a USB powered microscope)

Getting in Close

 In 'normal' years, I try to record all the wildlife that I can in our local wood, churchyard and garden during the year. However, with lockdown, this has become more obsessive! I am now starting on the very small creatures that are too small to identify with the naked eye and some are so minute as to require peering at through the microscope. Here we have 4 beetles and a member of the Collembola - a group of Arthropods separate from insects. The first image is using a closeup filter on my macro lens and is a Pollen beetle. The rest are my first attempts at recording with a USB microscope and I did not record the magnification but the beetles are around a 2 mm each.