Caesar's ocelli. magnification: 40x (88kb)
April 4, 2002
Caesar passed away last night of unknown causes. I held her limp, fragile body as she was dying in my hand last night and hoped some miracle would save her. The luster was gone from her eyes and she could barely move her legs. I can only hope that her almost four years with me have been interesting, if not happy times. She will be cremated, but her image will live forever on my shoulder(which I may post here at some future date.)
The images you see below were made with one of her first molts while living with me. I have since donated an additional molt to a friend as a teaching tool, but I have kept the remainders. Click on the thumbnails below to see the full-sized images.
Caesar's ocelli. magnification: 40x (88kb)
a detail of the dense short setae ventral side on the tarsus. magnification: 500x (124kb)
the shaft of a trichobothria(sensory seta) on the dorsal side of the foot. magnification: 3000x (67kb)
interior view of the molted sclerite surface surrounding the tarsus. magnification: 500x (111kb)
lamellae of the book lungs. magnification: 50x (74kb)
detail of lamellae gas exchange surface. magnification: 500x (80kb)
pore structures on the inner surface of molted mandible. magnification: 150x (146kb)
detail of pore structures as in above picture. magnification: 800x (122kb)
inner surface of molted mandible, with hair follicles and cuticle. magnification: 300x (105kb)
Technical notes: The machine is a Hitachi S-530 with a Quartz PCI image captures system on a Win95 machine. The images are saved as TIFFs which I've converted to JPEGs in order to cut down on memory. The samples are sputter-coated with about 100-250 angstroms of gold. While the images are not watermarked, they are copyrighted in my name, so if you do download them or post them elsewhere, please make sure that the url for this page accompanies the images.For more examples/info on scanning electron microscopy, check out:
Arthropods crawling over micromachines funded by your United States tax dollars...
********
For more information on tarantulas, go to:
the Tarantula page at the Arachnology Home Page(lots of links)
page updated: 04/04/02