Mapping A Tiny World: A Panoply Of Life

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More than any of the other photos, this one could be from an exotic new planet filled with obscure alien life.

On the edge of the wood, several life forms thrive in unison. Blurred in the foreground is the potential slime mold/fungus I posted a few days ago. Behind it, covering the edge of the wood, is a mixture of red-orange growth, covered in a layer of filamentous hyphae. Interspersed among the melange of living things are small, unaccounted for dots of yellow, near the top of the photo, on the left. This accounting does not include the myriad bacteria and likely insect life growing on this same patch of real estate.

I've also added an approximate key for some scale in this photo. I will be calibrating the microscope more precisely soon in order to give exact scale measurements, but in the meantime I can be relatively sure of this scale bar because I used a known sample in this photo to get it. I'm talking about that gray blob in the upper right hand corner. Next Tuesday we are going to investigate it, and it's numerous compatriots, all of whom appeared almost over night and underwent a transformation captured on time lapse. It may not be the most explosive time lapse photography ever taken - but as a first practical effort, I'm quite pleased.

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