Plan flour

Exsheathment was optically imaged using an inverted Nikon Eclipse TE 300 microscope, equipped with a Nikon Plan Flour 4x 0.13 NA, 10x 0.30 NA and 20x 0.50 NA air objectives, CoolLED pE-4000 light source, QImaging optiMOS sCMOS camera (1920 x 100, 100 fps) and open source Micromanager software (version 1.4). S1–S5 Movies demonstrating the effects of poly-L-lysine (±) and temperature (37°C and 20°C) on larval exsheathment were captured simultaneously using suspensions from the same batch of N. americanus larva for all conditions (larvae per condition > 20, experimental batches and repeats = 3). L₃ larva length and diameter and sheath width and length were determined using open source Fiji software (L₃ larvae n = 50 and sheaths n = 50).

An inverted fluorescence microscope (ECLIPSE, Ti-S, Nikon, Co., Ltd.) with an oil immersion objective (100×, Plan Flour, Nikon) was used. Movies of the sample were taken while moving the viewing field, and the number of clusters having various m values was counted. Approximately 1000 clusters were counted in the total for PS samples. For the titania sample, more than 50 clusters were counted because most of the particles formed large aggregates.
Large aggregates of titania samples were observed using a confocal laser scanning microscope (type C2, Nikon) and an all-in-one microscope (BZ-X800, KEYENCE, Osaka, Japan) equipped with an optical sectioning module (BZ-H4XF, KEYENCE, Osaka, Japan).
The particles’ surface structure and elemental analysis were performed using a transmission electron microscope (type S-4800, Hitachi, Tokyo) and a EDS/EDX detector (ULTIM MAX65, Oxford Instruments, Tokyo, Japan) at the Analysis Center, Nagoya City University.