Editor's note: Donald Ferry kindly offered to share on Micscape some of his excellent video stills he has taken of a hydra. A selection are shown below and three video clips. The author remarks: 'I took the water sample this fall out of an apparent discharge pond from some land with collection wells on a hill near 52nd and Dahlia.' The author used a Jenaval microscope and a 12.5x NA0.25 objective, 10x GF-PW eyepiece, with 0.8x set on the magnification changer, i.e. visual mag. 100x. The video camera was a Panasonic CV-950 and the field of view in the video clips is 1mm, so the hydra was ca. 0.9 mm long extended.

A more extensive collection of stills are presented on the author's home pages.

All comments to the author Donald Ferry are welcomed.

 

Video clips
These clips are 320x240 pixels in Quicktime 'mov' format. If your web browser or PC supports 'mov' files, clicking the link should open a Quicktime compatible player. Or click a link below with the right hand mouse button and use 'Save target' to save file to PC, then open the video file in a suitable video player e.g. Quicktime which can be downloaded from the Apple site.

Clip 1) Hydra extended showing typical movement of body and tentacles. (Size 1.63 Mbytes, length 30 secs)

Clip 2) Hydra contracted showing tentacle detail and typical behaviour when re-extends. (Size 770 kbytes, length 14 secs)

Clip 3) Hydra extended, contracting then re-extending. (Size 2.69 Mbytes, length 49 secs)

(Please note: the images are for personal use only and should not be further distributed or used elsewhere without permission from the author.)

 

Video stills





 



 

 

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