A lost slide found: Some thoughts: Putative Dying Dinoflagellaes; and Overview Images of Zooid Distribution

 As I was cleaning out my drawers, a slide appeared, caked in grime, that I had carefully labelled at some point using a crow quill pen wit, waterproof drawing ink, coated with clear nail polish.  The label provides the following information:  

Slide    : 530 ["A"]

Colony: Tog BE

Date.    : 15 April 1986

                    Fixative:  Bouin's 

                    Stain.    : #2 = Hematoxylin and Eosin

  

Green Cells: Putative dying Dinoflagellates, and date Medusae were Liberated

This slide is particularly interesting because of the date, and the presence of clusters of green entities that are probably deteriorating dinoflagellate symbionts.  Full Moon that month was on March 26 (need to double check this).   Medusae would have been liberated between 2 and 5 days after Full Moon.  This specimen may have been taken 20 days after Full Moon.  

Why are these clusters interesting?  Seeing the date, I have at least one new hypothesis to test:

 Since this date is 20 after full moon and the liberation of medusa was two to five days after Full Moon, does this suggest that after liberation, the entire colony reorganizes itself, the symbionts in certain regions being killed off?

I will revisit this idea at another time.

 Overviews of zooid distribution: a cyclosystem and random dactylozoids.

Two images are presented here of the same area of the slide mentioned above.  Actually, the date is inconsequential, as I was merely aiming for an, if one will, aerial overview of a small region, including a single Gastrozoid and its associates, the Dactylozoids, arranges in a Cyclosystem, .  The first is a single  brightfield image taken through a 4X AmScope objective; the second image is a 4x4 panorama assembled through Helicon Focus, software I have also used to take focus stacks of especially Millepora spp. skeletal material.  

Image I: A single brightfield image, 4X.  

I have not yet inserted a scale bar.

Image II: Darkfield panorama of 16 images taken at a higher magnification.

Panorama built up from 16 (4x4) images.  16X Objective.