Collection

The section Plathelminthes was established in 2009. The collection now comprises over 500 permanent specimens of terrestrial Plathelminthes from various Central European habitat types from Saxony.

Soft tissues of the free-living plathelminthes, essential characteristics such as protonephridia, sexual organs and certain other tissues, become invisible in the embedding media. Therefore, chemicals are used for staining during fixation and embedding in order to be able to recognize as many features as possible after embedding. Up to now, polyvinyl-lactophenol with the addition of a few drops of chlorazole black and Euparal have proven to be suitable for embedding. In addition, the animals are fixed with TAF (trimethylamine, aqua, formalin) for a few minutes before embedding and stained with neutral red.

A digital photo collection was established to document the features not to be preserved in permanent specimens.

In order to supplement and illustrate the characteristics that cannot be preserved in permanent slides, a collection of photographs is being built up that captures the animals alive with their decisive structures.