I had another morning therapy session in the lab. First, the bad news: I think there was an escapee. Sound the alarms! Head for the hills! Panic! Run in circles, scream and shout!
Actually, the problem is that I’ve moved some of the juveniles to my larger cages, and the one that seems to have gotten away was tiny, and I think she may have found a crack in the lid and scurried off to even wider vistas. In the future, I’m going to have to grow the babies to a larger size before moving to the bigger cages. Oh well. I hope she prospers out there!
The fun news, though, is that while I was tidying up I found a Mystery Box in one forgotten corner. It was full of antique microscopy gear! I think much of it might have come from my predecessors, Dr Gooch, who retired just a few years ago, or Dr Abbott, who retired a few years before I was hired here. This box contained an oddball assortment of video adapters — nothing that fits my current microscopes, and they’re all fitted with the old C-mount style threaded fittings for, like, CCTV cameras. I’ve been collecting these odds and ends for years, and I’ll add them to my mini-museum shelf. I’ll sort them out tomorrow, and maybe post a few photos here — I should probably catalog them at some point, because while they aren’t actually useful to me, except as curiosities, maybe someone out there could find a purpose for some fragment of a Zeiss scope from the 1980s.
Picture seems short of legs for a spider.
FFS ,first the doc breeds em ,then he lets they escape .
I’ma just drop this here:
https://twitter.com/Antiguo_Peru/status/1374079807827410946
Spider god mural in Peru
Oh Zeiss!! The Rolls Royce of microscopes. Brings back a tear. Went to Olympus for financial reasons. Never the same.
Yeah, I’ve found pieces of a classic old Zeiss, but not enough to rebuild a complete scope. I am very sad. I’ve got just enough of the fluorescence axis of the scope to guess it was probably a pretty high end scope from the 60s or 70s, though. Really rugged, solid stuff.
I’m using Leica, myself. I also couldn’t afford Zeiss.
NEWS! NEWS! https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/25/peru-archaeologists-mural-temple-spider-god-rain-fertility
My Google Fu is weak today. Recently I read an article about somebody getting a huge lens to work with their DSLR camera. I think it might have been a lens from a microscopy lab. It had some huge incredible aperture. .4 or .7 or something like that. The bokah was amazing!
He hacked his Sony DSLR to work without a lens and then had this lens sitting in front of it. Figure out the appropriate distance and duct taped it in place. He found it much easier to move the subject rather than the camera to focus. The zone of focus was less than an inch.
Seems like your spider friends would be the perfect subject for something like this.
I’ll keep searching for that article. It was way cool!