Under the Microscope

Over the holidays I did some online shopping and purchased a camera for my dissecting microscope.  We have a couple at work but I prefer to do most of my id'ing here at home.  It was an overdue purchase; beyond it's value for confirming specimens, building up a bank of photos and keeping records, I just find it really fun to throw something on the stage and have a look.  When I was young my parents got me a compound microscope; and while I've turned to the reduced magnification of a dissecting scope, I still use it with the same curiosity and astonishment.

I've got a few kinks to work out.  I have to calibrate the measurement tool and perhaps look into some better lighting, and I have to wrap my head around leaf means right and up means down (when moving something around under the camera on a computer screen), but here are a few trial shots I took.

This is the underside of a Ruffed Grouse feather.  Not something you necessarily need to see magnified but interesting nonetheless.

A fossil I had collected somewhere along the way.  The warm yellow/orange is simply a result of my light setup.

The seed pod of Foxglove Beardtongue (Penstemon digitalis).  The seeds of this plant are possibly some of the smelliest I've encountered, think smelly gym socks.  I've got lots of it in my yard, it's a bee magnet, even a Ruby-throated Hummingbird once, and often flowers twice in a year when cut back after the first bloom.  With over 250 species in North America and East Asia, the genus was previously a member of the Scrophulariaceae family, it's now considered a member of the Plantaginaceae family.  

I wanted to try out an aster seed, here's New England Aster (Symphyotrichum novae-angliae), although all aster species would probably look near-identical at this point.  Hard to believe a seed like this produced a 6-7 foot giant in my front yard.

For something a little different I grabbed a stem of Prairie Petunia (Ruellia humilis).  Not native to Ontario (range map here), but a nice pale pink-purple bloom from the prairies of the US Midwest.

 I was surprised to find that Hoary Vervain (Verbena stricta) has a two-sided surface to it's seeds.  These little sausage-shaped seeds are about 3mm in length.

Anyways, I'm excited to put the camera to good use next year!