I'd been seeing these teardrop-shaped protists for quite some time, and didn't really know what they are. They usually are very fast-moving, making it difficult for me to see much detail. This one may have been ill or injured in some way; it was quite slow-moving compared to others of its kind, and somewhat browner (not quite as green) than others. This afforded me the opportunity to see it in better detail than I've been able to see before. One thing that doesn't show in any of my still pictures — but which quickly caught my attention — was a rapid movement near the round-end, which I recognized as that of a flagellum. My impression was that this flagellum was somewhat tangled, and perhaps this is what prevented this critter from moving as fast as others of its kind. You can see a video of this here on YouTube. I'd not before been able to see this on others of this kind, and on seeing it, I now know this to be a flagellate of some sort, very likely a Euglena. Doing a Google Image search on “Euglena” seems to have confirmed this, as there are a number of other images, identified as Euglena, of creatures that look very much like this one.

This picture was taken through a microscope that I inherited from my father, using the 60× objective and the 15× eyepiece. The numbered scale that you see in the image is built into the 15× eyepiece, and when used with the 60× objective, the numbered ticks on this scale are 20 µM apart. I took this picture by pointing a cheap digital camera into the eyepiece of the microscope.

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• 2010-03-14 00:41 Bob Blaylock 1187×1920× (196636 bytes) {{Information |Description = A Euglena. |Source = I (~~~) created this work entirely by myself. |Date = ~~~~~ |Author = ~~~ |Objective = 60x |Eyepiece = 15x |PixelSize = 0.067 uM |NumberedTick = 20 uM }}