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Mar 25, 2024
This may be disturbing to readers who are afraid of bugs. If you aren’t, read on!
So … I’ve been wanting to look at bugs under the microscope for a while now. I’ve seen parts on prepared slides, but now that I’m making my own slides, I figured I should make my own at some point. While I don’t particularly love bugs (meaning I may or may not scream if I see one), bugs under the microscope don’t bother me. Or so I thought.
When I was exploring our tiny world under the microscope today, there was a mite in the tray where I keep my tools. Naturally, I picked it up with my forceps (not sure if this is the right tool, but for clarification, the mite was already dead), placed it on a slide, and dropped on a coverslip.
Not sure if it actually was a mite, but for blog purposes I referred to it as a mite. Probably will be repeating this experience again because my curiosity will get the best of me! Next time, I want to observe the body of the bug more, but I have to research how first.
I definitely need to work on putting the coverslips on more gently, because (don’t read this next line if you’re afraid of bugs - like me) I heard it squish. But that’s beside the point. Under the microscope, it looked like one big blob of brown/gray matter. And yes, I could see some liquid oozing out of the bug :( that was spread across the slide. By using polarized light, it almost appeared that the liquid oozing out was bubbles, or maybe it was small cells (but I don’t know if it was magnified enough to be cells).
During the process of moving the slide around and shifting it without a permanent mount, the coverslip shifted and took parts of the bug with it. I discovered this by looking at it under the microscope again, where I found that two of its legs had detached from its body. Creepy!
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