Help Identify Unknown Organism - I saw this under my microscope (Sep/25/2010 )

Looking under my microscope, I saw this strange thing, at 100x that appears to be a star fish with a proboscis. If you know what it is please tell me.

ZachSlayer117 on Sat Sep 25 19:15:24 2010 said:

IF you can tell us what sort of sample you were looking at that will help a lot. Also, do you mean 100x (10x objectove + 10x eyepiece) or 1000x (100x objective + 10x eyepiece)?

bob1 on Sat Sep 25 23:01:34 2010 said:

10x objectove + 10x eyepiece
it was in water from a flower pot. Here is a photo of what I actually saw.

OK, thanks. It pays to check the magnification, often people just go off the objective magnification.

At that scale, it doesn't look like an organism to me, seems to be a part of a shed flower head or perhaps a capsule off a moss or liverwort, potentially it could be stellate cells off a fern, but those are quite a bit smaller IIRC.

....or some worm/mite/insect hairs....

First i thought it might be a fresh-water Hydrozoan animal (e.g. Hydra spec.), but I don't think so as they won't occur in flower pots, or only if they were long time filled with water or the flower irrigated with lake water...If it's moving it would be an indication for this.
Rather might be some plant trichomes, as some species have branching ones:


From here.

This is probably unhelpful but the first thing that came to mind upon seeing the full sized image was an Alien Facehugger...

hobglobin on Mon Sep 27 10:26:21 2010 said:

Thanks
It was moving and the water was rather old.
I think its a hydra.