lettuce nudi eggs

[GaryP]

Here's a another factoid for you. Remember all the hullabaloo during the election about fetal stem cells?

Well.. you are looking at them. At this stage the cells you are looking at are all stem cells, just not human stem cells of course.

Gary

[Instar]

Fisrt the description, then the mystery.
Inside the clear egg shell, after all the divisions, on the second day they appear to hatch or metamorphos. At this time they suddenly GAIN a clear snail like shell around the abdomen, yolk and body parts. The head or two coiled sensory organs extends from the shell opening. Their eyes are right at the edge of the shell and mostly not visible in the pictures. The small foot is snail like under the shell. They can move fairly rapidly as they explore the outer walls of their confining egg case and twil around in the sphere. Its hard to focus because the egg case is clear, the protective shell is clear and the animal is white translucent. In the enlarged picture, the one most toward the middle you can see the foot to the right, the sensory organs coiled to about 1 o'clock and the shell to the left side. Inside the middle of the shell is the animal and that little dense spot inside the shell is some yolk material. Since they are flipping all around in their weightless spheres, you can see them from all kinds of angles.

The Mystery:There is an inner snail like shell that is the developmental home now and protects these larva in their first hours after hatching. It appears in that one majic moment on the second day after the "stem" cells have divided numerous times. Where does that "instant shell" come from???

Magnified x60:


Magnified x200:

[::pete::]

Steve,

Its difficult to take micro pics of a large 3 dimensional object. There's not a lot of depth of field in micro pics. Some of the more expensive scopes allow you to take a composite pic at several different focus points. Those are pretty research quality scopes though.

Gary

If you have a piece of black acrylic or something similiar hold it behind the subject and the camera should have a better chance of focusing.

Great shots !!

[scuba_steveo]

Instar that is just too cool. Most of what you are saying is greek to me but I understand that they are doing what they should be doing. Thanks for the updates.

[Instar]

I was asked for an update, so here it is...
Lettuce slug eggs at 12 days.
They have picked up some pigments along the flanks and behind the clearly developed eyes now. This is very hard to focus and photograph due to the cloudy gel casing of the egg coil. Its become cloudier and the embedded algae is starting to grow a little making them harder to see. They also seem to be able to see and react to visual stimuli.

[oceancube]

man i sure hope those are lettuce snail eggs, and not some sort of baby aliens, looks creepy, i would be very scared at night to sleep in the same place those are!! B.T.W looks interesting!!

[Instar]

LoL -- I picked up another couple thousand of these "aliens" tonight and got to photograph the within egg metamorphosis from an undifferentiated cell mass into the shell covered whatever this thing is called at this point. That was quite cool.

These things have to be pretty close to hatch day at this point.

[scuba_steveo]

Awesome Instar!!!
Where did you get the new couple thousand eggs from?

[GaryP]

I showed him some eggs in one of the tanks at Fin-Addict and Felipe gave them to him.

Larry is out to corner the nudi market. He's going to be the largest breeder of nudi in Floresville. Remember when he was always begging for aiptasia to feed his berghias, well... start looking for Bryopsis in your tanks.

Gary