Meet your neighbor ... who photographs protozoans

Good morning, DMV! It’s Tuesday, April 21.

While going through and responding to reader emails, I stumbled one from by Ed Davis, who lives on Capitol Hill and caught my eye with this description of himself:

I inserted bold and italics because … wow, what? He sent me this photo:

“Here’s a spring pic from the Reflecting Pool [by the Lincoln Memorial]. It’s way smaller than the eye can see, and it’s a stellate amoeba … [that] adopts a star-like shape until it can touch down on something,” he wrote. “I took the picture through my microscope using dark field technique, which lights things up like a night sky in the countryside. It’s doing a Dance to Spring,” he wrote.

I called him to learn more. He and his wife were on daycare duty with their grandson, so we chatted briefly then exchanged emails. I asked how he got into this hobby.

“I spent my babysitting money on my first, very crappy, microscope when I was around 11 in Annandale, Va. It came in a cool wooden box. That scope was barely good enough to get a blurry look at microscopically largish dead stuff,” he wrote.

“In high school in Phoenix, I saw my first living see-thru thingys in biology class and was charmed and fascinated. I have had a succession of pawn shop and auction microscopes since then and have kept returning to this odd hobby at intervals. I am not particularly well trained in biology though I taught field biology to high schoolers in a leftover radical nuns hippy school in Tucson.”

He explained: “I mostly use 200x and 400x magnification for these pix. As of about 5 years ago I started using a digital camera attached to the scope, that allows me to see the view from the microscope on a computer monitor. This is a lot easier for me as my eyesight has deteriorated ….

“Many of the things I look at move very fast … and they can swim out of view or out of focus in an instant. I put a drop of water on a glass slide and cover it with a very thin glass cover slip and put that on the microscope’s stage (the horizontal table beneath the objective lenses). It really is a stage in the sense that dramas unfold on it - as soon as I turn on the light.”

“Protozoans are single celled living organisms that are not exactly animal or vegetable, but are usually motile,” he explained. “Some protozoa photosynthesize. [Algae tend to be non-motile (or at least very slow). Bacteria are smaller and simpler.]”

A heliozoon, he wrote, “tends to have thin rigid arms radiating from a core. The arms have nasty things on them that can catch other microorganisms for eating. This one seems to have caught a diatom (note the golden chlorophyll).”

About this peritrich, he wrote: “These are a type of protozoan that anchors to a substrate with a retractable stalk. When they are unfurled (ie the stalk is extended), they have a bunch of cilia and cirri that whir around and pull streams of water into their open vase-like mouths and they attempt to grab the good stuff out of the stream.

“This guy’s cirri have been partly immobilized by the pressure from the cover slip, so they are easier to see than if they were in full motion. You can see part of the retracted stalk curled up down below.

“He’s probably about to die unless someone introduces more water to the side of the cover slip. In fact, every picture of a protozoan that I’ve taken is of an organism who has only minutes to live. Life on one of my slides is very very evanescent.”

He concludes: “An important point to make is that I often don’t know what I’m looking at and am often too lazy to try to figure it out (it can be very difficult). My big thrill is just to look and discover stuff.”

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A reader invited me to A People’s Choir DC sing-along at DC9 Nightclub tonight at 7:30 p.m. — which is late for me, but I’m tempted. Their theme: Earth, Wind and Choir.

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