It turns out they don't.
Here are some hairs from a toehawk:
They look the same as the hairs from her back:
Her undercoat, however, looks remarkably like that of an alpaca. Here is Autumn's undercoat:
And here is part of a fuzzball from my favorite alpaca sweater:
No wonder huskies are so huggable and fuzzy. They are the same as alpacas!
And just for fun, here is a sample of Bunn's hare hair. He has some that have two cortices under one protective sheath. How cool is that?
I didn't find any of these in a fuzzball from my angora sweater, so either angora bunnies do not have these coarse hairs, which would make sense since they have been bred specifically for their soft fur, or the coarser hairs are sorted out in the processing to make a softer sweater. Or maybe Bunn is just a hare with rare hairs.
By the way, the scale bars are off by 2x since these micrographs are downsized by .5.
10 comments:
Oh my gosh! That's so cool! I'm jealous I don't have an SEM to play with. :( I'd have so many bits of stuff I'd want to look at...
I'm sure you could ask Ken Severin if he wouldn't mind if you borrowed some tool time. Look him up.
Can you get some reindeer hairs by any chance? I'd like to see how they look since they are supposed to be hollow!
Well I'd have to have a better justification than `it's really cool, so I want to do it.` for SEM time... ;)
Hah! That's so great! I was going to ask if you could maybe do some wolverine or reindeer hairs, but I deleted it when I thought `nah, I wouldn't want to be a bother...` Email me your gradstudent mailbox, and I'll intra-campus off some sub-samples. How much would you need (ballpark)?
Hm, you don't seem to have your email address published anywhere, and neither do I, and neither of us want to make ours public, for very understandable reasons.
Why don't you send an email to danceswithrats@care2.com. That's the address that I use to sign up for things on the internet that might send me spam. :)
I'd only need a tiny amount, about half a thimbleful. :)
wow, interesting pictures. The undercoat has a different structure from the toe hairs.
Wow, interesting. The undercoat has a different structure from the toe hair. Wow, I wonder why.
Super cool! I vote for wolverine hair micrographs too!
-bt
Is it just me, or is there something that grosses you out about these pictures? Some of them look like insects!
Blippir, I'm not with you on this one, but I certainly understand what you are talking about. It seems that we each have our own triggers of things that yiff us out. For some people, it's romanesco broccoli. For our own mudder (you'll recall), this is Chia pets. One for me is that three-eyed smiley face. *shudder* I hate looking at the three-eyed smiley face!
I'd love to see human hair :) I've never even heard of a SEM before but those pics are so cool!
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