Copious Quantities of Copepods

Last night I was feeling creative again, so I drew a copepod, specifically Cyclops scutifer:

But my drawing pretty much stinks when you compare it to the photo I took today (of a different species) using our compound microscope camera:


See the ocellus (eyespot), hence the genus name? This lady (yes, it's a female) is about 1.5 mm long and was a survivor among several thousand other zooplankters (mostly Daphnia) that I collected more than a week ago and had long since kicked the bucket. She is covered in epiphytes - harmless green algae - which gives her outline a fuzzy appearance. I was surprised to see someone still swimming around in the collection jar. Unlike most of her jarmates she is primarily a predator (but also eats algae and other things), so she may have eaten some of the smaller Daphnia. Also, many cyclopoid copepods are hypolimnetic, meaning they inhabit the hypolimnion - the bottom layer of colder, denser water in a stratified lake, so she may have been more able to withstand the near freezing conditions of the incubator. Anyway, she's dead now!

I've spent most of the past few days (actually most of the past 5 years) counting copepods and other zooplankton like this for my research. I think it's fascinating, although most people probably think I'm a dork.