Herewith I am attached a photograph of benthic foraminifera. within these one of the species appears blue in colour ( showing with Red Colour Arrow). Please let me know the reason for colour variation for these species.
When you preparing your samples, do you use alizarin blue to clean your sieve? The blue colour seems like coloured by this..
Your sieves were cleaned with methylene blue. The remaining foraminifera took this blue. I think this is the reason that color. This technique methylene blue is used to recognize foraminifera from a previous wash and avoid fauna blends.
The blue coloured foram is a trochospiral exhibiting ventral/umbilical view. It may belong to Psuedorotalia schroeteriana or Ammonia dentata. The blue colour may be due to staining material used in the processing. In the photograph shown, most of the forms are Recent in age with couple of reworked specimens.
The colour is due to preventing faunal blends between two samples. It is caused by methylene blue (cf Annie's reply).
Looks like methylene blue indeed. In general: please make sure what exactly goes on in the processing lab. If there is no information on processing methods, important information gets lost and misinterpretations are inevitable.
By the way thanks for this useful picture! You may also have noticed the tiny snails.
usually we use methilen blue to clean the sieves in order to avoid contamination in sample praparation. if some particle stays stuck in the sieve, it will be blue, even if it's a foraminifer. so you will be able to recognize a microfossil that doesn't belong to the sample that you're studing.
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