what did we find today....

11/7/2008

Today I decided to view my microaquarium with the mindset that all organisms were exciting... Just because my cyclops died, doesn't mean that all the other organisms are any less interesting. So, today I found hundreds of Halteria (Free Living Freshwater Protozoa D.J. Patterson). They are taking over. Virtually every view I took had a handful of them. Finally I know what those are though!

I found several shelled rotifers (Guide to Microlife by Kenneth Rainis) as well that were feeding off these green dots that were in patches towards the top. At the bottom of my aquarium I found a lot of diatoms, Blepharisma and Nematodes (Pond 1 Smaller Microlife Poster). I was excited about the nematodes, some were small and one was very very large! And lastly I found 2 snails crawling around in my aquarium. I took some pictures and video of one, and found that I had another under the stereoscope, which I thought gave a very cool view of my microaquarium.

My first microaquarium

October 15, 2007  

I created my Micro Aquarium today and its pretty exciting.  I used water from the bucket labeled 7... but I'm not quite sure what the water source for this was.  Maybe I will find that out later, because there are a lot of different 

sources and I think it would be interesting to know where my little organisms in my aquarium are from.  I also added two plants, not sure what they were, but one, I believe, eats creatures?  Maybe I heard wrong, not sure though.  Will find out more later.

So when i stuck my microaquarium under the microscope it wasn't very exciting at first.  My lab partner asked me to look at hers for a second so I did and saw something HUGE swim by.  So I thought, well where are my big organisms?!?!?  Well, I didn't find anything big like I saw in hers, but I did find some neat things mine.  First, I saw tons of these little guys zipping around and later found out that those are diatoms... but I didn't think those were exciting enough.  I heard some kid across the table yelling about seeing some cyclops creature, so I was determined to find one of those in mine since we had used the same water source.  And I did!  I saw several, maybe 3 or 4, or just the same one over and over... But they moved so strangely.  It looked like they were on a computer screen, but were certainly interesting looking...  Below is an image on the net i found.

Besides seeing 2 or 3 nematodes, I also found several creatures that I cannot even begin to describe, nor find to identify them.... oh well....   For example, one creature had a circular head and a tail, but it had these crab leg things coming out of the center of the head.  Also, another creature had again, a circular head, but a springy tail... it would whip out and its tail would be straight, but then suddenly it was coiled again and would whip back out.  The organism was anchored down by something, maybe it was stuck, but it wasn't getting anywhere.  

Unfortunately that was all I had time to observe since the lab was ending, but maybe next week I will be able to find some other creatures, and this time identify them! 

 sources:  www.scientificillustrator.com/art/microscopic/cyclops.jpg

www.ucmp.berkely.edu/chromista/bacillariophyta.html