DMC DB Workshop - Day 1 cut it up

To ease us in to the workshop, we started by learning a couple of tricks on the microscope.  We made our own darkfield filters and reinhart filters.  Quick and easy arts and crafts time.  Reinhart filters were more fun than anything else - instant pop art!  Make a yellow embryo on a red background... Andy Warhol would have been proud.  Unfortunately, I didn't figure out how to use my camera with the microscope until later in the course... arg.  We used some beautiful ciliates to demonstrate the power of the filters and then looked at some sand dollar plutei.

After cutting up filters, we dove right into cutting up organisms.  (The theme of cutting continued throughout the course.)  We chopped planarians, brown and green hydra, and lumbricus worms all in the cause of understanding regeneration... and all in rapid fire, within ~ an hour or two before dinner.

By the end of the course, I had a camera-shy two headed planarian.

After dinner with a glass of wine, we had an introduction to sea urchin larvae - fertilization and first cleavages. I think they actually looked better in pop art than the ciliates, but I might be partial to urchins.