Little bugs equal big fun at library

Rick Cowlishaw gets all a-tizzy over the smallest things. And we do mean small.
Cowlishaw, professor of biology at Southwestern College in Winfield, was in Iola Thursday to show a dozen and a half young Iolans a world within a world, peering at single-celled organisms that live in pond water.
“There’s a lot of things that are alive that you can see,” Cowlishaw told the group, “but most of the life around you is microscopic, and most of that is in water.”
Cowlishaw shared his view by projecting images from beneath his microscope on to a large screen at the Flewharty House of Iola Public Library.
Ciliates, daphnia, copepods, rotifers — strange little animals swam about the watery world.
Pond water samples came from Iola and Chanute, he said, and were full of the common critters.
“The creatures you’re going to see basically do the same things we do,” he told the kids. “They move around, look for food and poop and pee, but on a different scale.”
Cowlishaw noted that, to put things in perspective, we should realize a human body is made up of about 10 trillion cells. “That’s a big number, like 12 zeroes after the one,” he noted. Ten trillion needs 13 zeroes.
The pond life on the microscope slide, on the other hand, was made up of one to a few dozen cells.
Ciliates are one-celled, he said, and move by waving small hair-like protrusions of the cell membrane.
Rotifers are multi-celled, but are smaller than ciliates. “They eat all sorts of things, like algae,” he noted.
Gasps and squeals erupted as larger, distinctly multi-celled creatures swam into view on the screen.
Copepods, related to shrimps and crabs, and daphnia, also known as waterfleas, looked more like movie aliens than animals, but both are common, Cowlishaw noted.
Though minute, copepods engage in strategic defense, discerning waves made as predators move toward them by wiggling their antennae, Cowlishaw noted. “A copepod can feel the waves coming and move away,” he said.
After his “slide” show, Cowlishaw put pond water samples at each of a dozen and a half microscopes for the youths to view themselves.
Small, spider-like animals scampered across some screens. And in another, a water scorpion sat like a walking stick with bugged out eyes.
The kids were fascinated.
“Any microscope is fun because it allows you to see things you can’t ordinarily see,” Cowlishaw said.