What we saw on our trip:

A rather cold Lizzie Harper makes a plankton collection. But the cold North East wind and overcast conditions failed to prevent us enjoying the time we spent on the coast. We also visited the great Storm Surge Sluice gates at the Oosterschelde, an engineering feat that makes our Thames Barrier look like a toy...

It's probably fair to say that the average Quekett sees much more of pond (freshwater) life than marine material. The trip provided us with a great opportunity to collect and identify (thanks to the expert help of Cees Bakker) a wide variety of beautiful and interesting marine flora and fauna. I used my digital Fuji camera for all these pictures, but was not sufficiently careful about the focus for some shots.

A sea squirt (Ascidian). Although not clear from the photograph the animal has other ascidians colonising it's back A beautiful spray of the polyp 'Obelia'. We also saw other polyps, including their medusae.

No trip to The Netherlands would be complete without a visit to the old city of Delft, amongst other things, the home of the father of microbiology - Antony van Leeunhoek. Eric Hollowday (Mr. Rotifer), outside the place where van Leeunhoek worked, gazes up at a cartouche of the man who first drew a rocognisable rotifer.

One of the Dutch microscopists is a talented artist - Wim van Egmond. I haven't seen his site at the time of writing, but having seen his beautiful drawings I have no hesitation in providing a link to his site - here

Altogether we had a wonderful trip, learned a lot, made many friends and enjoyed ourselves enormously. Our grateful thanks to all our Dutch friends, and especially Jan Parmentier for his great generosity and efficient but unobtrusive organisation.

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