u/Pavel-chemist

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Just walked in park and found this mantis on walkway. Took some photos while it was sitting on my hand, and the in flew to nearby tree.

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Started with several ~1mm seed crystals put into the filtered saturated table salt (non-iodized) solution in distilled water. For several days nothing happened, only that seeds got slightly smaller, and afterwards growth started, mainly on crystal corners. In two weeks such salt snowflakes had grown.

By the way, the seeds were put in a water for a second before placed into solution for growth, to smooth surface imperfections and remove attached microcrystals.

The growth chamber is empty container, I to which two smaller containers are placed, one with top open, containing growth medium, and other with lid and small hole in it, containing copper sulphate monohydrate acting as humidity sink.

Although these are pretty, such result is not what was intended, and further attempts will be made to grow monocrystals, preferably clear ones.

If anyone knows, is this result of too fast growth, or something else at play? How to improve growth to prevent it being only on corners, thus preventing dendrites?

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Images made with 100x oil immersion objective, 9

frames at varying depth stacked with Zerene stacker, several stacks with different shifts made into rocking gif using ezgif.com website.

The alga is of desmid family, and features two lobes, of which one is fully visible on image. This is the big exemplar, with lobe width of 75 microns. One can see surface features as well as the structure of algae's chloroplasts.