The Microscopist's mate, part 8 of many.

Just for the record, all of what you find here, and in the other blogs in this series, is now available in fuller detail in my e-book Looking at Small Things.  Go to this link to find out more about how to get the free low-resolution copy, or the cheap high-resolution version: I'm a professional writer, so I like selling books, but I'm also a professional educator, so I like sharing ideas.

There's a similar free or cheap deal on offer for my Playwiths ebook as well, and to see what else I have been doing (LOTS!), go to this link.

You know what they say about ducks, calm, serene and quiet on the surface, paddling like #**@!^ underneath?

Well, that's been me, over the past fortnight, but it's all been worth it.

In one direction, I have just finished going through the the design draft of Australian Backyard Earth Scientist.

Thanks to Jo Karmel's patient editing and Stan Lamond's meticulous design, it now looks and quacks like a book. Or a duck. The bird above, by the way has a name, but  I use the name as my alter ego in another place, so I'm not telling! (What I will tell, is that the National Library of Australia will publish in in January 2019.)  The picture above indicates the likely appearance of the cover, but no guarantees, OK?


But wait, there's more! I have finally worked my way to the end of a guide for K-6 teachers on introducing the gentle art of microscopy in a simple way to young people. You can find it as a PDF by clicking on this link.

Basically, I have looked at all the exciting things you can do with a clip-on magnifier and a device (phone or tablet) to photograph small things. I matched each of these activities to the sloppily drafted pious hopes that make up the National Curriculum.

All of the images (except the one showing the gadget, above) were taken with the Go Micro, and the circle you see is a 9 mm field that you get on a device with no digital zoom.

I did this work as a pro bono for the people who are marketing these Go Micro gadgets: they are a start-up, based on Flinders University. In case you don't know, pro bono is Latin for posh people. As I said, a couple of years back, Latin is a very useful language, at times. Excreta tauri cerbrum vincit.

Back to garnering images, I care about this project because one way into the sciences is by the study of nature, which has absolutely nothing to do with the rubbish my cohort was subjected to in Year 6 under the name "nature study", work that I suspect was mandated by a po-faced and unadventurous pile of stodge, splendiferised by the cognomen 'curriculum'.

No, I want adventures, and here's one I haven't written yet. It is based on the 'skin' or exoskeleton of a huntsman spider, left in my garage after it moulted.

Now huntsman spiders are hard to photograph, because they run around, so I wondered what I could see, and after I looked and found things like the long face on the left, I called this adventure

...do spiders have eyelashes?
First off, I shared one of the images with my older grandchildren, who are 9 and 11, and used to grandpa's odd friends. I headed it: 'A really GRUESOME spider?'

This is really a harmless Australian spider called a huntsman. The circle you see there is about 9 mm across, so it's fairly big.

Well, to be precise, it's only the skin of one. When insects and crabs and spiders and things need to grow, they burst out of their skin. When they do that, there's a soft skin underneath, and they push that soft skin out before it hardens. We call this moulting, but don't worry about that name so much.  The important thing is that the skin sits still for photos.

In the picture, you can see the transparent skin that covered the eyes, lots of whiskers, and also the fangs, which curve around too much for them to be able to bite us. 

I hope you two like it, because at least one species of Australian huntsman spiders is now living in New Zealand.  If you ever watch the movie 'Arachnophobia', you will see the NZ spiders.

Why? Well, it seems the ones that survived in NZ had a "communal habit", meaning they lived together as a group, while the Australian ones prefer to be alone.  If you want mobs of spiders to move together, the New Zealand ones were the best ones to use.

Now, back to my question about the the eyelashes. Today, I started getting adventurous, zooming in by using the built-in digital zoom that comes with most devices, which means losing a bit of clarity.

Still, the bristles that were hard to spot in the first image are now fairly clear.



Here, we can see four of the eyes, but I wasn't finished yet. I zoomed in again, and blow me down, don't those whiskery things look more than a bit like eyelashes?

They aren't eyelashes, of course, but things like that must have evolved for some good reason, and doesn't that look like a nice little question to debate?

Or maybe it sounds more like a future Ph. D. topic? From little things, big things grow, and if those questions have already been solved, there are other huntsman bits to be investigated, like these shots of a palp and some gleaming fangs:

And because the source was a sloughed-off skin, no animals were harmed!

Now back to fitting things to the curriculum, anybody who has seen me in a workshop will know my on-man dialogue:

Me 1: But where dos this fit in the curriculum?

Me 2: In the slot marked Wonder...

Me 1: But there isn't and slot marked Wonder...

Me 2: (grinning wickedly): Then make one!

Oh the things we can think...if we're allowed to.