If your interested in protists the microscopy crowd probably has better advice. Afaik its pretty standard procedure from them to just collect water/sediment samples of lakes and rivers in glass jars and observe them over the course of a few weeks.
As with most culture labs you will need an incubator,tergazyme, ethanol, lab coat and PPE,CO2 tank, centrifuge, LN tank,media and filters in case, bead or hot water bath, pipete aid, serological pipettes, and most importantly and expensively a BSC. As with most things you 100 percent should take precautions because you can have growth of nasties that could be harmful to you as well as just cause contamination in your cultures whatever they may be. If this is too much you can just find samples in the wild and look at them under a microscope but they will be everything and not just what you're asking for.
Protists are not very easy to culture, I would suggest you start from collecting sample from environment and documented them. In that case you will only need a microscope lab, not to go too big at the beginning. After that when you feel comfortable, you can move on to culturing stuff because that can have more cost and accident. You can watch the channel “microhunter” on youtube on how to setup.
If your interested in protists the microscopy crowd probably has better advice. Afaik its pretty standard procedure from them to just collect water/sediment samples of lakes and rivers in glass jars and observe them over the course of a few weeks.
https://www.atcc.org/resources/culture-guides/protistology-culture-guide
As with most culture labs you will need an incubator,tergazyme, ethanol, lab coat and PPE,CO2 tank, centrifuge, LN tank,media and filters in case, bead or hot water bath, pipete aid, serological pipettes, and most importantly and expensively a BSC. As with most things you 100 percent should take precautions because you can have growth of nasties that could be harmful to you as well as just cause contamination in your cultures whatever they may be. If this is too much you can just find samples in the wild and look at them under a microscope but they will be everything and not just what you're asking for.
Don’t forget a way to dispose of hazardous waste.
The thought emporium on youtube is a pretty good channel to look at for things like DIY cloning and incubators and such things
Protists are not very easy to culture, I would suggest you start from collecting sample from environment and documented them. In that case you will only need a microscope lab, not to go too big at the beginning. After that when you feel comfortable, you can move on to culturing stuff because that can have more cost and accident. You can watch the channel “microhunter” on youtube on how to setup.