Microscopic Hair/Pigment Research 

Why look at horse hairs under a microscope? 

We're trying to determine if horse colors can be differentiated by looking at their body hair pigment arrangement microscopically.

Photos by Oregon educator and dungenes list member Kim Bauer.  

She shined the light from the Bioscope at 200x onto her ceiling, took photographs, scanned those, and emailed them to me.  God bless her for all of that tedious work!!!

You may click any of the thumbnail photos below to see the full size.  WARNING: most of these pictures are ENORMOUS, to show as much detail as possible. I've tried to crop off unrelated background areas.

I'll put the corresponding horses' pictures on here soon, I hope.  They are mostly duns.  Some hairs are from white markings, some are from the body but appear white, some are colored body hairs (no mane and tail hairs in her collection at all.)  Some of the thumbnails have been distorted to make them a standard size; the actual size photos are true to proportion, but cropped.

Horse's info	Hair Root	Hair Middle	Hair Tip	Horse's pics	Remarks
Kiger Sundance,  true dun	root   root		tip
Casper,   graying Kiger	face hair root face hair root shoulder hair root shoulder hair root	face hair middle face hair middle shoulder hair  middle	shoulder hair tip
Diego	white root	colored colored colored white	colored tip   white tip
Diego & Gato
Kiger Dundee,  true dun
Dusty,  palomino
Traveler,  bay Appaloosa w/white socks.		white hair middle   white hair middle	colored hair tip colored hair tip white hair tip

These web sites might also be of interest to a student of this subject:

http://www.keratin.com/aa/aa008.shtml
http://www.officeicon.com/ms200.htm
http://www.officeicon.com/favicon.ico   
http://www.mrllab.com/hair.htm 
http://www.londonweb.net/mosquito/hair.htm
http://treasuredpets.netfirms.com/hair.html

The 7 pictures below are from early Feb. 2004, taken from the new (then) "Digital Blue" computer microscope.

I include them as a test for the microscope and also for comparison to the horse hairs picture from Kim Bauer, above.

Three hairs from my head at 60 x:

My natural color hair at 200x: 

My gray hair at 60x: 200x:

Three pug dog hairs at 60x: (not all in focus at once)

Amir's chestnut mane hair at 200x: (Arabian horse)