How do you arrange your microfossils on your slides?

[Calli99]

Yesterday I was picking through an incredible recent sample from Dogs Bay, Ireland which contains an abundance of foraminifera, ostracods, spicules, gastropods and echinoid spines and have been wondering about how I am going to arrange them on my slides. I am relatively new to microfossils and use microfossil slides with 32 grids. In this instance, is it more common protocol to create separate slides for each type of microfossil (e.g, slide 1: forams, slide 2: ostracods etc.), or to just create a mixed slide that may be more representative and also more interesting to look at but which also makes it harder to logically organise? How do you organise your microfossils on your slides?

 

I hope my question made sense, thanks!

[doushantuo]

does this help

http://www.microscopy-uk.org.uk/mag/artaug11/Micropaleo-Slides.pdf

[Calli99]

No not exactly as I buy the slides and know how to mount the fossils. It’s more about the arrangement in which to mount them. Do I use separate slides for each type of microfossil (foram, ostracod, Bryozoa etc.) as there are enough of each to fill a slide I’m sure; or do I have a combination of all of them on each slide.

[JohnJ]

I would arrange them by site locality for each general type.  However, it's ultimately your preference; just document them well. 

[Calli99]

Yup I think that’s what I’ll do, though I might make one slide with a mixture to show others. Thanks for the input!

[ynot]

It is really a matter of personal preference.

Whatever is pleasing to your senses is what You should do for the display.

[Rumi]

I only collect forams and ostracodes, and usually mount them on separate slides -- so I end up with two slides per sample.  I also make single cell slides for each species that I identify in my collection.  For those, I select one or two specimens only, two specimens only if that's required to show all of the structural features of the taxon.

 

But I think everyone has different ideas about displaying their collections though, so do whatever looks good to you!

 

Rumi

[Foram-Mike]

I put my forams and accompanying objects in slides with holes, preferably alltogether in one slide for one sample. I use slides with 4 holes up to 32 holes. This way I can turn them to see all sides and get them out to shoot images. I may easily rearrange when I get new insights into the IDs for example split a group of specimens, which at first sight looked alike.

 

For presenting the incredible stuff you usually have in a nice sample I think slides are not a good means. Who looks at it and if how many seconds ? At the beginning  of my foram-"career" I decided to shoot images and show them to friends, family and colleagues thru the internet. As photographing might be challenging the foraminifera.eu project started with the offer to everyone to shoot a couple of images of forams from sent in material and this offer still holds. Of course for free.

 

In the course of time we created some interfaces at foraminifera.eu, which allow the user to arrange the material in different ways. A physical collections holds the specimens only in one way of sorting.

At the moment I am working on forams from the Mauritanian shelf, which then translates into a nice collection at:

www.foraminifera.eu/querydb.php?OB=sorted+by+morphology&locality=Mauritanian+Shelf&aktion=suche

 

sorted by morphology.