About Coverslip

Coverslip is a small, independent identification guide to the organisms you can see in a drop of pond water with an ordinary student or hobby microscope.

It started in November 2026 from a simple frustration: most keys to freshwater microlife are either for specialists or are long lists of photographs. Here you answer a few questions about what you actually see (how it moves, what shape and colour it is, how much of the field it takes) and get to a group, with video clips of living organisms to compare.

The key stops at the level of groups and well-known genera. Many organisms can only be named to species with careful study, special preparation or a specialist's eye, and we would rather be roughly right than precisely wrong.

The video clips are not ours. They are free recordings published on Wikimedia Commons by microscopists, teachers and researchers, used under their licences and credited on each clip's page. We trim them to short loops, remove sound and convert them for the web.

If the key led you to the wrong answer, or you know a group well and think a step is misleading, please tell us through the correction form. That is the most useful thing a visitor can do for this site.

To reach us, use the correction form; it is read by the people who maintain the key.