As a nature photographer, one sometimes has to resort to weird tricks in order to be able to "get" the picture. For the recent Eelgrass (Zostera) studies I have to make a comparison between Z. marina and Z. angustifolia and optimistically tried to do photomacrographs of the leaves and their nervation. "Optimistic" as in not paying enough attention to the fact their foliage gains the required tensile strength by having numerous strands of sclerenchymatic tissue inserted into the blades. These dense strands make the leaf opaque rather than transparent when you shine a light through the blade and it turned out I couldn't get any "clear picture" of the nervation and even less of the specific differences.
Back to the kitchen desk -- literally -- for some pre-processing wizardry. The leaves needed to be boiled in alcohol, then soaked in sodium hypochlorite, washed in distilled water (which in my country can be substituted by tap water), and finally stained by a suitable dye. I had acridine orange dye so used that. It is a fluorescent staining dye and at present I'm boiling the stained sample in water to get rid of the air bubbles trapped inside the blades. Night turned into day so I'll have to wait until another night fall before I can mount these samples and examine them with UV fluorescence, but so far all looks good.
Oh well.
