Microscopic Hair/Pigment Research 

Why look at horse hairs under a microscope? 

We're trying to determine if horse colors can be differentiated by looking at their body hair pigment arrangement microscopically.

Photos by Oregon educator and dungenes list member Kim Bauer.  

She shined the light from the Bioscope at 200x onto her ceiling, took photographs, scanned those, and emailed them to me.  God bless her for all of that tedious work!!!

You may click any of the thumbnail photos below to see the full size.  WARNING: most of these pictures are ENORMOUS, to show as much detail as possible. I've tried to crop off unrelated background areas.

I'll put the corresponding horses' pictures on here soon, I hope.  They are mostly duns.  Some hairs are from white markings, some are from the body but appear white, some are colored body hairs (no mane and tail hairs in her collection at all.)  Some of the thumbnails have been distorted to make them a standard size; the actual size photos are true to proportion, but cropped.

These web sites might also be of interest to a student of this subject:

http://www.keratin.com/aa/aa008.shtml
http://www.officeicon.com/ms200.htm
http://www.officeicon.com/favicon.ico   
http://www.mrllab.com/hair.htm 
http://www.londonweb.net/mosquito/hair.htm
http://treasuredpets.netfirms.com/hair.html

The 7 pictures below are from early Feb. 2004, taken from the new "toy" Digital Blue computer microscope.

I include them as a test for the microscope and also for comparison to the horse hairs picture from Kim Bauer, above.

Three hairs from my head at 60 x:

My natural color hair at 200x: 

My gray hair at 60x: 200x:

Three pug dog hairs at 60x: (not all in focus at once)

Amir's chestnut mane hair at 200x: (Arabian horse)

To join our "dungenes" discussion and photo-sharing email group, click HERE.

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© 2007 Barbara A. Kostelnik