Transcript

FLAXTON

Because this particular Russula was immature, I was, unfortunately, not able to get a spore print. So I've taken a section of the gill and washed some of the spores off with the iodide stain Melzer's reagent. And we will now look under the scope and see what the spore shows.

At 100 magnification the spores are not giving up much detail at all. We can possibly see the shape of them, but that's about it. So it needs higher magnification. So we'll move up to 400. And we now start to see the ornamentation on the spores. The shape of the spore is very obvious. And the ornamentation is there, but not in any great detail. So again, we need to move up to the highest magnification, 1,000.

When you move to 1,000 magnification, it is an oil immersion lens and needs oil between the glass slide and the lens itself. And now we can clearly see individual warts and ridges between some of those warts. And by moving the point of focus, we can also see how deep the warts are, or how tall they are, standing proud of the spore itself.

Using stacking software, we can show all of these features in one slide, rather than having to move between different points of focus.