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Eww! Ear mites :) - pictures inside

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JimH

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I took two new cats of ours into the Vet today and got them their initial checkups and vaccinations. I also had them checked for ear mites because one of them was shaking her head and trying to scratch her ears (telltale signs).

The vet let me look through her microscope to see the little buggers (Gee, how'd she know I was a geek who would enjoy such a thing??). Anyhow, they've now been treated with Acarexx which, from my reading, appears to be just the ticket.

I found a chunk of ear-gunk in the kitty carrier when I got 'em back home so I figured it had to be infested too. Sure enough, upon close inspection, I found four of these critters. They're tiny, but I thought I might be able to get something useful with the MP-E 65 lens so here are my attempts.

May I present, for your viewing pleasure, Otodectes cyanotis:



Boring, so I put a couple of them on a penny for some scale:





They spend a lot of time wandering, then doing head-stands. I can only imagine what they're trying to do when they do that!







Not the greatest shots in the world, but now you know why cats and dogs shake their heads when they've got ear mites :)

I've got to go now, my ear itches...

--
Jim H.
 
Genuinly interested by this one as my moggy has just been given the all clear of these after about 6 weeks of ear drops. Apparently they can be quite difficult to shift.

tip - wrap him/her in a towel when giving the drops, ours squirmed and scratched alot.

does make your skin crawl abit although the vet assured me humans can't 'catch' them!
 
Too cool.

Without any research whatsoever, my guess is that they are doing headstands to get their fuzzy tails in the air to hopefully catch a passing animal.

Hopefully you euthanised them humanely...like with a shoe or something. :)

Or you could start a flea circus, you already have the acrobats. :)
 
I wanted fairly harsh lighting so I just used the MT-24EX direct with no diffusers or any attempt at softening the light.

I tried a few with the little sto-fen covers on the heads, but I actually preferred the harsher direct light look with the covers removed.

For most of the shots, I had a 2:1 ratio dialed in between the two heads but on some I just set it for 1:1. The MT-24 EX is a great flash for use with the MP-E65 lens. It makes life very easy yet offers a lot of adjustability.

--
Jim H.
 
I've had this one time before with another of our strays. She had ear mites pretty bad and we treated her with the Acarexx. It only took one application in each ear to completely clear it up. And you don't even need to clean their ears first. So it's a pretty easy treatment.

The vet said (and I've read) that you should check again for the mites in about one month after the dose of Acarexx to be sure they're gone, but at least for our other cat, the one dose did the job.

It must be really nasty stuff! And of course, you end up with it all over you. The vet even mentioned this when we were giving it to these two new cats. You put the drops into the ear, then rub the base of the ear to spread it all around inside, then you stand back because they inevitably shake their head and it sprays everywhere. I ended up with some all over my face and in my mouth - I hope it's not too toxic ;-)

After that first ear on the first cat, I learned to keep my mouth closed during the "head shake" phase :)

But it's not as bad as that pink-colored (and bubble gum flavored???) antibiotic liquid that, in my experience, doesn't go into the cat, but instead gets sprayed all over your walls and ceiling when you make your futile attempts at getting some of it into their mouth in hopes that they'll swallow some of it. Why don't they make cat antibiotics in liver or fish flavor instead of bubble-gum? My cats won't take the stuff. I've totally given up on it. If I ever am prescribed any oral antibiotics for a cat, I refuse to buy it and instead just tell the vet that I'll bring the cat back for a second injection if necessary because neither pills nor liquid ever makes it inside of the cat. It's always a complete waste to even bring the stuff home.

Anyhow, now I'm drifting far off topic, I guess :)

--
Jim H.
 
When I was done with them, I smashed them with my fingernail :)

I know, that's not the usual bug-macro-shooters credo, but these things are highly contagious so they had to die :)

I think you may be right about the head-standing. Either they're trying to orient themselves to be picked up on a passing critter, or they're trying to bite onto the penny hoping it's actually the skin of an animal. It's pretty odd, really.

They walk around, then do a head stand, then walk a bit more, do another head stand... Pretty funny to see, really.

--
Jim H.
 
What magnification was the MP-E set to? What was your set up (I assume not handheld, as body motion can make it really hard to keep the focus plane where you want it).
--
Jeff Peterman

Any insults, implied anger, bad grammar and bad spelling, are entirely unintentionalal. Sorry.
http://www.pbase.com/jeffp25
http://www.jeffp25.smugmug.com

 
These were all shot at 5X and hand-held (sort of). The little critters walk fairly fast, so I had to constantly keep moving to get them somewhat in focus. The DOF is just so darn narrow at that kind of magnification as you well know!

So I had the penny on a sheet of white paper sitting on a desk and then I'd rest the front of the lens on my hand which was resting on the desk (actually on the paper a lot of the time). That makes it more steady than fully hand-holding the rig, but still lets me move things fairly fast.

I use that method a lot with the MP-E. I hand hold the camera with my right hand and let the front of the lens be held by my left hand, but with that hand resting on or against something solid with respect to the subject. So it's fairly steady, but really easy to move.

The other trick was to use a small, but very bright LED flashlight as a "modeling light" to let me see things fairly well. The lights on the MT-24 are handy, but you must keep turning them on over and over. Even with that mapped to the half-press, it's annoying. So I often use a little flashlight to get some good viewing and focusing light onto the subject.

In this case, I often found myself moving the focus point to just a bit ahead of the marching bug and then waiting to shoot just as he (she?) walked into the right place. It's almost like sports shooting where you're trying to capture the peak of the action. In this case, for hand-held macro, I try to time the shots for when either I wobble into the right place to have the focus right, or the bug moves into that place - or a combination of the two. I'm "timing" the focus if you will.

But the real secret is resting my left hand on the desk while holding the front of the lens with that hand so that the hand becomes a semi-rigid (yet controllable) "mount" for the front of the lens.

--
Jim H.
 
I have not had a chance to test everything thoroughly, but it seems to work quite well now.

They even cleaned it up. There had been a smear of something on the mirror, and it's gone now.

I need to test the clipping points again and also check for hot/warm/stuck pixels, but so far, just using it as a camera, it's looking very good :)

They obviously fixed the main issue (the fact that it couldn't take any pictures). I'm having fun with it again. It really is a heck of a machine.

Oh, and those nice face worms look lovely. I should check out my own face.

Sometimes, I wish I had an electron microscope to get those really great shots! I'm amazed at the DOF they seem to get in those SEM photos. I wonder how that works.

--
Jim H.
 
I put the piece of "ear gunk" on a sheet of white paper. The critters started wandering around on that paper. I then put the penny on the paper and used the tip of a pocket knife. They'd crawl up onto anything in their path, so they'd crawl up onto the tip of the knife blade and then I'd take them to the penny and tap the knife on it until they fell off :)

--
Jim H.
 
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