I was pretty shocked to see how much life was hiding in my local pond in early December 😳 The temperature was around 2°C and my hands were hurting from staying in the water too long (after taking a couple samples). In clip 1 appears a small water bear on a Volvox algae! It’s the same one I posted on Sunday, feeding on Volvox like it was bubble tea 🧋 Clip 2 shows a graceful Stentor coeruleus, the blue whale of the microverse! These are among the largest cells that exist and you can see them with naked eyes. Their blue colour comes from a pigment called stentorin which plays a major role in defence mechanisms. When Stentor is being threatened by a predator, the toxin from the stentorin pigment granules are released in the environment, which cause the predator to retreat! Clip 3 shows some golden algae colonies named Synura! and each of them measure between 0.03 and 0.1 mm, depending on the species and the number of individuals in a single colony. Synura tend to bloom when water is cold and are often encountered during spring or autumn in freshwater ponds and lakes. In clip 4 you can observe some Volvox algae, smaller golden dinoflagellates, planktonic rotifers with a triangular shape and a small chydorid (cousins of water fleas) zooming by! Clip 5 shows a planktonic rotifer that ate some algae creating a blue colour when broken down by digestive enzymes, making it super easy to locate the stomach 🤠 In clip 6 you can observe a huge Trachelius ovum, a freshwater ciliate! It has a small "nose" at the front of the cell called the proboscis which is used to sense the environment and potential preys. You can also see the mouth right next to the proboscis. Clip 7 shows three Volvox colonies surrounded by dozen of small Synura colonies ✨ Videos were taken with my iPhone mounted on a BA310E Motic microscope with an @ilabcam ultra adapter 🔬 #fyp #microscope #animals #lake #science