Thai tardies (I) As you will be able to figure out, the travelling budget of a free online
magazine like the Water Bear Web Base as a rule will be limited. Instead,
we do receive samples from our friends and readers from time to time.
Recently a married couple sent us some ocean sand/water samples from Thailand and
we are quite happy to report the results here.
The samples came from a beach of the Marriott Hotel near Hua Hin. You will be
able to trace the locality just by copying the following coordinates
to the Google Maps® command line: |
Fishermen in Siam (today: Thailand) specialising on holothurians. Engraving from 1863. The illustration was first published in Henri Mouhots diary "Voyages dans les royaumes de Siam ... 1858-1861" (published in 1863) and is assumed to be based on the very first photographs of this region. It was not possible to print photographs properly at this time, so the photographs had to be converted into engravings like this one. |
Of course we didn't want to cut the tentacles of peaceful creature like the holothurian just in order to find some tardigrades. Besides it would have been complicated to transport the holothurian in fresh state by airplane. So it was quite clear that our classical sampling method with a little bit of sand and sea water in a plastic film container had to be used. Below you will perceive the content of this film container as documented by means of a computer flatfed scanner. |
The sand/seawater sample. Image taken by means of a flatbed scanner. |
When using a stronger magnification, the fine sand samples can be better investigated and measured: |
The same sand sample, as seen in under a "real microscope", in transmitted light. |
As usual, now the tedious search for the tardigrades followed. After a few hours of searching we came across a first Batillipes cuticula! Up to this moment we had never found a freely floating isolated cuticula. |
This empty cuticula clearly indicates that some tardigrades
are around (or at least were around recently).
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With a cuticula there are reasons to hope that some tardigrades might be close! We will show them in the next issue. |
© Text, images and video clips by
Martin Mach (webmaster@baertierchen.de).
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