Anoxic microforay part I: Aggregations and contractions

First I'll dump a few pictures of the strange bacterial swarming described in the earlier post, followed by some hawt ciliate action. First the bacterial swarming sequence; any suggestions/explanations/musings/factoids welcome and encouraged.

Stated the objectives used as opposed to magnification. No proper microscopist cares about mag anyway as it's rather meaningless. Also, I have no idea what the 'mag' is in this case anyway...the bacteria are small, about a couple microns or so. Sorry there are no timestamps - no idea how to put them on. Overall sequence spread out over about 5min. Phase contrast unless stated otherwise.

[Edit 20.08.10: Compressed pictures into a slideshow, thanks to Edward's helpful tips + tutorial; noticed the blog page is becoming harsh on the loading time, hope this helps]

EDIT 22.08.10 Moving pics to slideshow turned out more complicated than it should be, and don't have time to fix with an impending flight to internetlessness+vacation in a couple hours...really sorry, will fix + put up pictures ASAP once I get back!

I think the theory at the moment is that is may have something to do with optimal oxygen concentrations (ie low) towards the middle of the slide; oxygen would diffuse more at the edges of the cover slip, and this was an anoxic sample. However, it may have been near the centre as a coincidence; my sample size is kinda tiny here.

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Was recording Vorticella generating feeding currents in phase contrast when another obnoxious ciliate rudely interrupted the shoot; these three frames are consecutive, note how near-instantaneous the stalk contraction is!

Here's another one contracting, in DIC:

There are more photos to come, but processing and identifying them is time-consuming, and I'm still ridiculously behind on my actual work...so that should come later.