White cherry

[Baccus]

Yeah, I am guessing you would need an electron mircoscope of really high power. But you might be able to take a flesh scraping and try growing whatever is inside the shrimp on agar if you have acess to petrie dishes and maybe a somewhere warm to store it till stuff grows.

My sister is a microbiologist (amongest being a genetists etc) but its a shame she is in Africa, otherwise I would ask her if she could do any research on the shrimp at the Uni she works at.

[fishmosy]

Electron microscopes are only good for looking at surfaces so not really suitable for trying to see parasites within tissues. I'll start with a disecting microscope (up to 100X zoom) to see if there are any parasites. Then I'll move onto the compound (up to 1000X zoom) to see wthin cells, hopefully using some stains to make viewing easier.

Growing anything on agar is really hit and miss. Its only really good for bacteria and fungi, and firstly assuming it is a bacterial or fungal infection and secondly assuming you can isolate these from the shrimp cell, there is no guarantee it will grow. Of all the bacteria on the planet, we can only grow about 1%. Even if something grows, doesn't mean that it the cause of the disease as there are plenty of bugs that live in or on other organisms that never cause any problems. Its a complicated process to identify a causitive agent for a disease.

[fishmosy]

Haven't forgot about this. I had a look at some shrimp today with some very interesting results.....

Hopefully I can post pictures once our fancy new $40,000 florescence microscope with camera gets set up next week.

[Jess]

Hey Fishmosy, any update on this? :)