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Comment by JKCalhoun | Hacker News Reader

I wish there were a way to "productize" this, or automate it at least.

I'm imagining some sort of aquarium-like tank you stock with ocean water that is able to maintain the microscopic life, allow them to flourish. Meanwhile, some sort of slow or periodic pump draws aquarium water into an attached, miniature "photography studio" where an appropriate camera+lens feeds a constant live stream to a display or to the web or to a Bond-villain's giant projector in their lair.

What a wonderful "screensaver" to have when the occasional appearance of a micro organism graces your screen. Perhaps too there are as-yet undiscovered species we might find with such a device?

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We do this in the salt water aquarium hobby. It is not easy and requires a lot of equipment to keep the food chain flowing.

1. You have to grow a phytoplankton culture (the base of the food chain) https://melevsreef.com/articles/10-step-phytoplankton-cultur...

2. Then you have to map out to the zooplankton culture chain you want to grow. Usually in the aquarium trade the target are foods that larval fish will eat etc. There are only a few types commercially available. So you would never see the diversity you are seeing in the article.

Conclusion, you can only do it with fresh sea water from the ocean. I would recommend taking a sample from 0 to 10ft on a reef during a full moon or where there is a lot of light. You will see much variety!

I think it can be done. Automated liquid handling and microscopes do exist.

We had a confocal microscope in our lab with a robotic arm attached and can automatically image samples. I'm not of the details but the samples are big compared to its field of view so I believe it searches for images with cells before imaging. A lot of experiments are done on these plates with liquid wells.

This isn't our model but shows a larger scope with automated robotic arm and a "plate hotel":

https://confocal.ccr.cancer.gov/nci-microscopy-core-labs/bet...

I'd go into why we switched from PerkinElmer and their proprietary image format to a GE but thats outside the scope.

It's been done! Very niche market however. This is a tow-sled system for deployment from a research vessel.

https://www.planktonimaging.com/

My daughter, 18 at the time, "productized" this for me - by buying me for Christmas a cheap digital microscope. We looked around the house for something to look at, and decided to try a drop of water from our aquarium.

I don't know the company, but there was one sold in a local toy shop some years ago. The idea was that this was essentially one "slice" of a pond, think of a very thin aquarium tank that was in the window. It had been seeded with a variety of small plants, algae, tiny critters and the like.

Meant to be a closed system, where it was all what was inside the glass, plus the sunlight from putting it in the window. Very cool, you could see tiny things swimming around in there.

I believe they operate one of these in the microscope exhibit at SF Exploratorium. They're right on top of the bay (literally on a pier) and sample the water all the time, and IIRC, they put the samples into accessible high-end microscopes.

There is an open hardware device you can build by yourself to do that: https://www.planktoscope.org/

That device is called the internet ;)

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