Embryo-thon

For today, not only do we have another Litoria peronii embryo (left), but a rather smaller beastie.

This afternoon I spotted the little guy on the right attached to some weed in one of my aquaria, so fished it out and put in on a microscope slide to try to get a photo, seeing as embryography seems to be my current obsession.

It's an egg of the Crimson Spotted Rainbowfish, Melanotaenia duboulayi. Close to hatching too. You can see a photo of a newly hatched larva here.

Now we're talking about something of a different scale to the frog embryos here. My estimate for the diameter of the frog eggs at this stage is 4 mm. The rainbowfish egg is about 1mm. To photograph it I used a 28mm lens reversed on bellows with about 13 cm of extension. It's a bit hard to see how the fish is arranged in the capsule, but basically it's got its body and tail coiled around its head. Those eyes even swivel at this stage.