Sophomore Mary Lou breezed into lab one day in 1900 only to find her nemesis Cheryl too closely associating with her senior colleague "Jimmy-the-Bod". Mary Lou had had her eyes on Jim for some weeks now. But Mary Lou just did not have the terrific intellectual and morphological genes that made Cheryl attractive to Jimmy. Anyway, while the pair's backs were turned, she took a live culture of bacteria from her rack and poured a little into each of the three cultures standing on Jim's sunny desk next to the window. Ooops, they were turning around! The tube of contaminant was hastily put into Jimmy's rack. With considerable satisfaction at not getting caught, Mary Lou slipped away and out of the room. Cheryl and Jim set about to inspect their three cultures under the microscope. Today they were studying 'very large' microbes: Bacillus megaterium is one of the largest true bacteria, and it also sometimes possesses a round spore; Centimeter-long Beggiatoa is a 'higher bacterium' which is photosynthetic and converts sulfide to sulfur; huge Spirogyra is eukaryotic with a distinctive helical single chloroplast. They made "wet-mount" slides of each under cover-slips, and set them on their desk as they set up their microscope.

    Two hours later Mary Lou returned to the scene of her crime to find that Prof. Bengston had joined Cheryl and Jim as all three were whooping it up and excitedly discussing what they were seeing. (Below are 6 microscope views, and one of the hastily placed test-tube itself.)

    You will note that the rod-shaped B. megaterium has a spore in this view. The Beggiatoa has blue-greenish cylinders as well as some sulfur granules that look like little black diamonds. The helical chloroplast of the Spirogyra is very distinctive, and its nucleus is not very distinct. Samples were also taken for microscopic viewing from the tube that had been sitting for awhile.