Reef nutrition

Loaner microscope for club use

IOnceWasLegend

Frag Swap Coordinator
BOD
Hello, all,

Knowing I'm a former lab rat, my wife's coworker offered to give us a microscope. While I want to keep it for personal use, I won't need it full time, so I wanted to make it available for supporting members to borrow if they need to ID stuff from their tanks.

Microscope info: Seiler Westlab compound microscope with 4x, 10x, 40x, and 100x objectives. With the 10x eyepiece magnification, this gives total magnification of 40x, 100x, 400x, and 1,000x.

Located in San Jose.

  • The 100x objective is an oil objective (if you don't know what this means, ask). I don't have any immersion oil at the moment, though, so it's limited to the 4x, 10x, and 40x objectives.

Rules:

1. Must be a supporting member of the club for 60 days prior to signing up to borrow.

2. You'll be responsible for pickup and drop off (I'm in San Jose).

3. Please return it within 14 days of borrowing (or pass it off to the next person).

4. Clean the microscope. Protect the microscope. This includes always keeping it in the upright position, and picking it up only by either the base or the neck.

5. If you haven't used a microscope, tell me and I'm happy to give you a crash course (I'll update this post later with links showing how to use it).

5a. If you use the oil objective:
  • Do not get immersion oil on the other objectives
  • Do not leave the objective immersed in oil for extended periods of time.
  • Do not use oil other than microscope-grade immersion oil.
  • These kill the microscope.

I'll have some slides and coverslips for each person that borrows the microscope so you won't have to buy any. Cheers, all!
 
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Awesome! A good microscope can be an important part of troubleshooting problems like algae/dino/cyano outbreaks. It’s also just freakin’ cool to explore the microfauna in our tanks, a whole new dimension to enjoy In the hobby.

You may want to list what city you are in if you will be keeping the scope. If at some point you would like BAR to take over managing the scope like we do other equipment, let us know. But for now at least I think your offer to show people how to use the scope properly when they pick it up is actually worth more than the scope itself, so that is very generous of you.
 
Also useful for identifying fish parasites via scale scraping. I’ve never done it but partly because I’ve never had a microscope to use.
 
Awesome! A good microscope can be an important part of troubleshooting problems like algae/dino/cyano outbreaks. It’s also just freakin’ cool to explore the microfauna in our tanks, a whole new dimension to enjoy In the hobby.

You may want to list what city you are in if you will be keeping the scope. If at some point you would like BAR to take over managing the scope like we do other equipment, let us know. But for now at least I think your offer to show people how to use the scope properly when they pick it up is actually worth more than the scope itself, so that is very generous of you.

Agreed; and hence why the friend gave me the scope: I did molecular bio and cell culture, so having a scope to look at the minicritters in our tank was making me geek out (in addition to being able to calm myself down if I'm ever worried about dinos).

I noted what city I'm in in the post (San Jose), but realized it's kind of buried so I've updated it in my profile. As for how to use the scope, my pleasure: I didn't mean to sound anal retentive with the rules in the post, but those are all things I've seen undergrads do in our labs, and just wanted to give peoples a heads up on the biggest no-nos.
 
After having offered this a couple times, a second option for those of you who want samples ID'd but aren't quite sure/worried about using a microscope:

If you're willing to drop off sand/water samples in San Jose (meeting at Neptune would be easiest), I'm happy to do it for you, snap some pictures, and help you ID what you have. Aside from being fun for me, it'd also help me with a side project I'm working on.
 
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