there are three types of cartilage fibrocartilage elastic cartilage and hyaline cartilage and you can tell that it's cartilage because cartilage will always have lacunae and lacunae are empty spaces so you can see all of the three types have those lacunae and they also have chondrocytes chondrocytes are the cartilage cells which are living in the lacunae so the lacunae is the empty space the chondrocyte is the cell within it so to differentiate what type of cartilage you're looking at you can ask yourself two questions what am i seeing in between the lacunae and how far apart are the lacunae so if you look at the highline cartilage in between the lacunae do you see any visible fibers no in between highline cartilage it looks very glassy but if you look at the elastic cartilage now you're going to see little fibers in between the lacunae and the fibers that you're seeing are elastic fibers when you look at the fibrocartilage you also kind of see like a fibrous stringiness which you're going to see a little better when we look at closer pictures but if you look at the lacunae they're much farther apart than what you see in the elastic cartilage elastic cartilage i believe is always stained purple because elastic fibers stain purple i don't say to rely on color too much too often but in this case i think that it's true that elastic fibers will always be stained purple so the next thing i'm going to do is i'm going to show you a couple slides and i want you to use what i just told you to see if you can figure out what i am showing you all right so what are we seeing in between the lacunae does it look like fibers no it looks more glassy and that's how you know that it is hyaline cartilage so here you're seeing fibers and the lacunae are kind of far apart and that's how you know it is fibrocartilage so fibrocartilage the fibers kind of look more like ramen noodles if you've ever had ramen noodles so if you said this was elastic cartilage i'm sorry but i tricked you it is once again fibrocartilage because you're seeing those ramen noodle fibers and the lacunae are kind of spread far apart this one would be the elastic cartilage because you have the lacunae spaced close together and you see the purple fibers in between all right that's all i have to say about how to tell cartilage apart i hope it was helpful have a great day and have fun learning