March 8th was an especially fun day on the BioBus! About a dozen kids from ages 2-10 got on the bus, learned about cells, made some great drawings, and got to use a microscope. We looked at cheek cells, fish cells, hair, and even some snot cells! Below are s few of the movies we made throughout the day.
Crawling Fish Cells!
We got some cells from the scales of gold fish - and looked at what the did under the microscope! The bright structure in the upper left corner is actually the very edge of the scale, and these cells had crawled off of the scale and onto our petri dish. There are several different cell types seen here, and several of them are moving! Click the pictures to play the movies.
Crawling Keratocytes
One of the cell types we saw is called a fish keratocyte. These are fish cells whose job is to heal the fish's scales when it gets hurt. But in order to get to where they are needed, these cells need to be able to crawl long distances very quickly. We didn't make our movie quite long enough to really see this cell move that far, but if you look at the nucleus of these cells, you can see that they are moving in one direction. You can easily see how the membrane of these cells is moving forward and backwards very quickly. This is one of the ways that the cells find out where it is going - by grabbing onto the surface and pulling backwards, like a rock-climber feeling her way up the side of a mountain, looking for solid hand-holds.
White Blood Cell
Another type of cell we saw was a fish white blood cell. These are fish cells whose job it is to attack and kill foreign invaders that might make the fish sick. These cells usually hang out in the fish blood, but when the fish is injured they can go almost anywhere to do their job. These cells are smaller than the keratocyte cell, but this cell is moving really, fast in spite of its dimunitive size!
