It’s a very exciting time over at Microcosmos.store right now.
Not only have we just restocked our original Microcosmos Microscope, but we’ve also got
a new model of our microscope available that comes with Plan Achromatic Objectives.
But fear not, if you have the original microscope and would like to upgrade your
objectives, we have a set of 4 Plan objectives available for purchase.
And we’ve got individual 20x and 60x Plan objectives available for purchase as well.
But that is not all!
We’ve still got our Microcosmos sweatshirt available,
as well as our tardigrade and hydra shirts.
We’ve even got a new Microcosmos mug that lets you and the people around you know exactly how
many tardigrades you could squish into your new favorite coffee mug.
And last but not least, we’ve got our Microcosmos sticker pack, which includes some of the designs
from our Artist Series t-shirts as well as a brand new “Tardigrade Enthusiast” micro bumper sticker!
So, if you’re looking to do some holiday shopping for the
tardigrade enthusiast in your life, or just for your own tardigrade enthusiast self
head on over to microcosmos.store, and be sure to order soon
if you want to guarantee delivery before Christmas.
If we were to watch this video together with our usual microcosmos mindset,
our focus would be on that bristleworm inching its way through the background.
We would watch it poke its head around as its
body sharpens and blurs under the lens of our microscope.
And those bright shining objects it fumbles its way through would
simply be props for our wormy star, providing a mythical quality to its
surroundings that make it even harder to tear our gaze away from the screen.
We might treat those grains the same way we treat the bits of leaves or moss or branches
that decorate our other slides, which is to say that we might note them and then move on.
But not today.
Today, we’re going to shift our focus and let those grains be the focus of our show.
More specifically, we’re going to talk about sand.
James, our master of microscopes, gets samples of sand from beaches all over
the world to help in his quest to learn more about interstitial ciliates—the single-celled
organisms that live in the watery pockets that exist between grains of sand on the beach.
In a previous episode, we have explored the ways these organisms have adapted to the chaotic maze
of sharp sand grains that is always shifting and crashing around them with the waves. But
for this episode, we’re going to experience that sand in a slightly more chill way, so that we can
appreciate just how beautiful it is on its own.
Now most of the grains you see in our sand samples
are quartz, gleaming with this rainbow sheen as polarized light from our microscope hits them,
bouncing off the silicon and oxygen atoms arranged within the mineral.
The process of making these sand grains at the beach is like an endless voyage. It begins with
the wearing down of rocks, as physical and chemical forces slowly chip away at them
and send pieces sailing down rivers and streams. And eventually those pieces will reach the ocean,
where the waves and tides around them erode the pieces even smaller.
Not all of the minerals that journey to the ocean will last as long as these grains do. Some of them
are more unstable, making it easier for them to break down. But quartz and other minerals like
feldspar are more durable, and that keeps them around for much, much longer. But over time,
the ocean will wear those bits of sand down into finer and finer grains.
This ceaseless process has been going on in some beaches for thousands of years,
if not longer. And the result is perhaps a reflection of what beaches can be in general:
a place that brings things—or people—from far away, and yet they reflect the local
environment as well. The minerals and tourists may be distant, but the essence is far more specific.
After all, beaches are not just sand and water. They are also an ecosystem full of life.
Which means, yes, that they must also be full of death.
There are of course the fragmented shells that have washed to shore,
hinting at creatures large and small whose bodies relied upon them for protection.
And then there are structures like that single point lancing through the middle of this slide
like a transparent needle. That was once part of the exoskeleton of a sponge, a part called a
spicule that acted like a brick glued together by a collagen-like material called spongin.
There’s another spicule here, on the right side of your screen, with three transparent ends radiating
out from the center. These structures are unique to each species of sponge, their shape and size
and chemical make-up a marker of their identity. That sense of individuality makes spicules kind of
like sand. The minerals that accumulate into sand grains reflect the geology of whatever
has shaped the beach to begin with, and you don’t always need a microscope to see those influences.
Perhaps most starkly, you can think of the black sand beaches of Hawaii, made from the
erosion of volcanic material like basalt rock. But even the more mundane brown sand you might
typically associate with beaches tells a story. The brown color is the result of
minerals like feldspar or iron oxide, which can render quartz into that brownish color.
But in beaches where quartz begins to exceed those other minerals, the result is white sand.
Though not all white sand is quartz. In fact, not all beaches are simply a matter
of rocks. Sometimes, they are literal tons of poop. Really. In Hawaii, parrotfish will eat
algae that grow on coral reefs, which means the parrotfish might also ingest some of the coral
itself. And after digestion, the parrotfish poop out calcium carbonate from the coral,
which makes its way to the beach as white sand. And these are not the only beaches whose beauty
is shaped by the life that lives in nearby waters. In Bermuda, the famous pink of their beaches is
the result of tiny unicellular organisms called foraminifera, which live in calcium carbonate
shells like the swirls you see here. Within those beaches, those shells eventually get broken down
and washed to shore, and reddish pigments within them color their new surroundings.
These foraminifera don’t seem to have had the same pinkish effect on the sand
where their shells ended up. The conditions around them created a different landscape, a
distinct and multifaceted identity told through a kaleidoscope of countless grains. A reminder that,
on this planet, wherever you look, the biology is geological, and the geology is biological.
Thank you for coming on this journey with us as we explore the unseen world that surrounds us.
And thank you to all the people whose names are
on the screen right now, These are our patrons on Patreon. We love that we get to take some
pieces of glass, arranged in a very specific configuration and point them at things to see
things that were entirely hidden to the vast majority of humans and we get to share that with you. And I am
very grateful to everyone who supports the channel so that we can do that. If you would like to join,
you can go to Patreon.com/JourneyToMicro. If you want to see more from our Master
of Microscopes, you can check out Jam & Germs on Instagram,
and if you want to see more from us, there’s always a subscribe button somewhere nearby.