size does matter!
Shamefully, I neglected to observe within five(5) days of collection, my specimen plastic bottle from most recent hike.
Always a joy to observe specimen jugs with unaided eye and a simple LED pen-flashlight. Meiofauna active, gracefully hanging hydras with tentacles slowly trawling the waters, copepods skipping along, the various colors in the sediments, and in the water column itself...it's relaxing as nighttime star gazing for me.
So shame on me, a recent NEGLECTED specimen jug left at my microscope bench.....had a baby fish in it!!!! Never before have I capture a 'fry' by mistake, with pond or swampland, or wetland samples collecting!
I fed this fry for three days with finger-pulverized flake-fish-food, then release it to an outdoor microcosm with dense floating surface plants (for the fry to safely hide within the dense tangle of floating plants, and avoid being itself eatten).
On the bottom sediment of this same neglected specimen jug...was a dead fry, with filmy cloud of recycleing organisms about it. I took a chunk of this 'composting dead fry', with a needle probe, placed the chunk in a wet-mount microscope slide, and observed with medium power magnification. Size does matter! charlie guevara NJ,US
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