Hey everyone! It's Ariel Waldman from
Tested. I host the show Offworld
on Tested, which is all about exploring
the science of science fiction in space
movies and pop culture. It's a lot of fun
and we always have really awesome guests,
so if you haven't had a chance to check
out previous episodes of Offworld either
on the YouTube channel or on your
favorite podcast app, definitely go check
those out. Like most of the Tested team
I'm here in San Francisco where we are
sheltering in place due to the COVID-19
pandemic. I thought since the world of
microscopic critters has been thrust
into the spotlight so much due to this
virus that I would balance things out
sharing a more friendly microscopic
critter that we should all get to know
better: the tardigrade. Also known as
water bears, tardigrades are delightful
little animals and what's really awesome
about them is that you can find them
around your own home. So I thought I'd
share with all of you how you could
actually find tardigrades near your
own home or even online. Some of you may
know that about a year ago I led a
five-week expedition to Antarctica to
film tardigrades and other microbes
living underneath the ice there.
I brought microscopes with me into the
field so that I could really film and
see these creatures in motion, because a
lot of people view Antarctica as a
completely lifeless place, but the
reality is is that Antarctica is
actually full of life. It's just
invisible to us without a microscope. In
case you're interested in what it's like
to spend five weeks in Antarctica, I
filmed the entire expedition and put it
up on my YouTube channel and will drop a
link to that here, too. The result of all
of that work is that you can actually
explore all the microscopic animals and
critters that live in Antarctica from
your own home without a microscope. No
microscope required. I recently launched
lifeundertheice.org, which is a
website that essentially is a virtual
microscope, allowing you to wade in and
delve into this entire petri dish of
curiosities, and pan around and find new
microbes and zoom in and out of them and do a
bunch of really cool things. And you can
even share individual microbes that you
find with friends or family and it's
just a lot of fun to explore and it's a
thing that you can do from home without
really leaving your couch. Okay, but how
do you find tardigrades around your
own
home? They're famous for surviving the
vacuum of space and living in Antarctica...
why would they be around your own home?
Well, this is what I love so much about
tardigrades. They're everywhere on Earth.
They have the nickname of moss piglets
because they love moss. So anywhere
there's moss, there's a good chance
there's tardigrades there. So just think
about that as you're walking out of your
house or around your neighborhood. If
you're getting a walk during this
quarantine and you're allowed to take
hikes or walks, you're likely walking by
tons and tons of tardigrades. Zoos of
tardigrades in sidewalk cracks, in parks,
in your potted plants, everywhere. They're
really everywhere and that's what I love
so much about them because they're
really these fascinating tiny, tiny,
little animals that can survive so much
stuff but they're all around us.
So I'm going to show you how you can use
some household items and I'm going to
also test out some of the relatively
cheaper microscopes that are available
on Amazon to see how they hold up. This
is totally something that you can do
with no prior experience. I myself was a
self-taught microscopist for a number of
years before I joined the San Francisco
Microscopical Society, and then later got
certified at Merritt College's Microscopy
Program. If you're interested in
levelling up in microscopy, local
resources like that are really awesome.
But this is definitely something you can
do even if you've never touched a
microscope or tried something like this
before.
Fair warning though, this is a little bit
like doing a puzzle. So you will need to
have some patience and it might take you
a couple or a few hours to sort of get
the hang of it and find some tardigrades,
but if you're patient and stick with it
you will definitely find some. First, you
want to gather your supplies. So, for
sampling moss, taking up little pieces of
moss out of either sidewalks or your
garden, I typically use a cheese knife
and tupperware. You can also use spoons.
Really anything that helps you sort of
lift a little bit of moss up out of the
ground and put it into a container,
that'll work fine. Next, for filtering the
samples so that you don't get a bunch of
dirt obscuring your view when you're
looking for tardigrades, you're going
to want some just plain tissues and some
sort of mesh strainer. So that mesh
strainer can be something like you find
in your kitchen sink or the sort of
thing that you use to put powdered sugar
on your french toast.
Beyond that, you want to get things like
bowls or cups or jars or lids. Things
that you can really repurpose for petri
dishes or containers. Really anything
that works. Definitely dive into your
drawers and see how you can get creative.
Science is all about getting creative
with reusing weird things for other
purposes. So there's no really hard and
fast way of what you have to use.
But definitely diving into your kitchen
drawers or some of your closets to see
what containers you have and what might
work best for you, definitely go do that.
I do recommend buying disposable plastic
pipettes if you can get them. But if
you can't get them, using something like
a turkey baster in your own home will
work. It'll just make your life a little
bit easier because essentially when the
tardigrades get filtered down they're
kind of at the bottom of the bowl and
you want an easy way where you can get to
the bottom water of the bowl, or at least
pour out a lot of the top of it. So if
you don't have a turkey baster and you
don't have pipettes at home it's really not
a problem. Just try and use cups or bowls
that have a pour spout so that you can
very gently, very carefully pour out the
top layer of water after you filter them.
If you want to get slightly fancier,
definitely feel free to buy some petri
dishes and slides and slide covers and
clear nail polish to seal your slide
covers onto your slides. You don't have
to do that, but you know, it can be fun to
play around with all those sort of
supplies. And then finally, I'm going to
be reviewing and testing for different
microscopes that are fairly more common
and relatively cheaper, relatively
speaking. So I'm going to be looking at
the Uhandy Mobile Microscope Duet, which
is $130 on Amazon that pairs with your
phone fairly easily. I'm going to also be
looking at around a $75 stereo
microscope that is typically used to
inspect electronics that a lot of you
may already have something like that in
your own home. I'm also going to be
checking out a more expensive microscope.
The inverted field microscope that's
$600 on Amazon. And then finally, I'm
going to be looking at my own Bausch and
Lomb microscope. It's a 1960s
microscope, stereo microscope. I don't
expect you to have that exact model in
your own home but I know a lot of people
do have stereo microscopes in their own
workshops for looking at all sorts of
things, so
thought I'd have that in there just for
comparison sake. Once you have your
supplies, go into your backyard or a
nearby sidewalk or a park and look for
moss. I was able to find some moss
growing in between sidewalk cracks that I was
able to sample with my little cheese
knife and tupperware. And it's just
really fun to find moss in all sorts of
different places all over. Once you're
back home with your moss, what you want
to do is get a tiny bowl. Put the mesh
strainer inside of that bowl. Put a
couple of tissues on top of that
strainer, and then take your moss and put
it on top of those tissues. What you then
want to do is pour water on top of the
moss so that the moss... Essentially the
bottom layer of the moss is touching the
top layer of the water. This allows for
all the tardigrades to get filtered
through and sort of sink to the bottom.
So once you soak this overnight it
activates the tardigrades, gets them
really excited and perky. Because, well,
they're known as water bears. They love
water. And then you can take out the
strainer, take out the tissues, take out
the moss. And then what you should have
at the bottom of that bowl are a bunch
of tardigrades because they sunk to the
bottom. So then you want to either
pipette out the bottom of the bowl and
transfer it to a petri dish or a jar lid,
whatever you have available. Ir if you
don't have a pipette at all then you
want to very carefully scoop out the top
layers of water without disturbing it
too much so that you have a smaller
water sample to work with and you have a
more condensed water sample of
tardigrades to work with. At this point
you are ready to go on a tardigrade
safari at home! Exciting! Don't get
discouraged if you find a bunch of other
microbes. Other microbes are also really
cool. It's really fun to see what sort of
things are living in moss. I'm going to
wager I guess that you might find a lot
of worm-like creatures when you try
this for the first time.
Those are nematodes. There are so many
nematodes in the world. It's estimated
that there's maybe 60 billion nematodes
for every single human on the planet, so
don't get discouraged if you find a
bunch of nematodes for a while and it
takes you a little bit longer to find
tardigrades. They're not as prevalent
as nematodes are, and that's totally
normal. The way to actually identify a
tardigrade while you're looking through
different microbes and you're not really
sure what's what, is look for stubby
little feet with claws on them. If you
find stubby little feet with
claws on them, it's a good chance that's
a tardigrade and it's a really exciting
moment. They're typically between a
quarter of a millimeter to a millimeter
in size. So they come in all sort of
different sizes and that's totally
normal. So, here's what I was able to see
with each of the four microscopes that I
tested at home. So, first I started out
with my Bausch and Lomb Stereozoom 7.
Again, I don't expect you to have a 1960s
version of a Bausch and Lomb Stereozoom,
but I wanted to try it out since I'm a
little bit more familiar with it. So I
used a really tiny petri dish and found
a tardigrade and was able to zoom in and
out of the tardigrade between ten total
magnification to 70 total magnification.
When I talk about total magnification
I'm talking about the objective times
the eyepiece. I then transferred our
little sidewalk friend to a Uhandy
cover slip that comes with the
microscope Duet case that you can get
off of Amazon. And then I used their high
magnification lens on my front-facing
camera on my phone to see what I could
really see. I was able to see the
tardigrade and I was able to see it at a
pretty good size. The only problem with
the Uhandy, using this high mag the way
I was was, that you have to create your
own light source which can be a little
fiddly if you're doing it in the middle
of the night like I was. You know, so, it's
a little bit of juggling and there is a
bit of distortion at the sides but it is
a mobile microscope that does work, and I
think if you're willing to juggle around
light sources and getting it to fit
perfectly on your phone, then it's not
such a bad option. I then moved our
tardigrade friend over to the inverted
portable microscope. This is a really
cool microscope because it's really a
proper microscope in a tiny size. So you
get the optical clarity that you expect
to have with a normal microscope and I
was able to look at it between a hundred
to four hundred total magnification. So
you can get really close up if you
really want to investigate those claws
or look at different aspects of a
tardigrade. It's really great for that. It
also has a built-in LED light source so
you don't have to worry about light
sources at all and that LED light source
can be battery-powered or with an
adapter, so that's definitely useful.
Finally, I wanted to see what you could
actually see with the $75 stereoscope
that's typically used for looking at
electronics and I was really delighted
to see that you can actually get
a good image with the tardigrade in it.
It's just very small. Well it's really
small and it might not be the
magnification you want. I was personally
really excited about it because you
could see in a tiny drop of water just
how big that tardigrade is and really
get more context for what tardigrades
look like when they're crawling all
around you. Okay, that's it for me but
definitely share with us what microbes
you were able to find in your own home
area or on lifeundertheice.org. We
definitely want to see and we want to
geek out about them with all of you.
Otherwise, I'll see you next time.