mushroom spores

[dave k]

HI,

Has anyone had any experience of looking at mushroom spores under a microscope? I've been looking about evil-bay and there are a couple of USB hand-held jobbies that will display 50-100 times magnification on your laptop. Is this enough to use them to aid in mushroom diagnosis?

Or if they are useless, any recommendation's for a cheap(ish) microscope that I can use? I'm not sure if the hand-held field ones are powerfull enough to display the spores or not..

 

[xylaria]

I don't think x100 mag would be enough. Also a webcam or phone camera can be mounted on very easliy on the eye piece to which the can be veiwed on a PC without eye strian.

I don't use a microscope. The only time I seen a descent image of a spore was with a oil imersion microscope (x1000)at uni 15 years ago. I have learned to do without but most modern fields guides tend to use microscopic info. I would make things alot easier and quicker with a mircoscope. Remember to calculate magification multiply whats on the eye piece by the objective.

 

[stevesteve]

Hi Dave,

I bought one of those Intel USB microscopes (for the kids of course ). It's OK for looking at fly wings, fossils etc but for spores I would imagine that you would need the sort of kit used in palynology which means a decent microscope. As Xylaria said you really need oil immersion for the higher magnifications (and lenses made for oil - don't try it on any others!).

 

[scoops_uk]

Did 3 years of microscope work at Uni, I did botany so there was lots of mycology in there too.

Buy a second hand proper microscope. As with most things optical it's not the numbers but the quality of the glass lenses that matters.

Something like this or this would be ideal. A good microscope is an investment, a cheap one is next to useless.

You will probably need to learn some staining techniques for viewing spores etc.

You might find this site useful too.

Scoops