Day 28

          The first thing I noticed today was the food pellet that was placed in everyones micro-aquarium is not gone.  Every time I looked at my aquarium under the microscope there was always a huge abundance of organisms surrounding the food pellet, most of them feeding off of it.  In only two to three weeks these tiny organisms have demolished the pellet.  I find this amazing.  This being the last week of observations I really wanted to focus on how organisms have changed, multiplied, or the variety of new organisms that have appeared.  Compared to the first week the number of organisms have increased dramatically, along with the size of these organisms.  The first week or two I only saw a select few rotifers, but now they are in the plants, the soil, and swimming around in the space with nothing.  Along with the rotifers, the seed shrimp have increased in numbers and size, the first week I spotted one seed shrimp, this week I found five. Today I noticed a bunch of "Philodina rotifers" (Micro Invertebrates) that some how I have not stumbled upon in the past.  These rotifers seem to stay in one place and they have multiple cilia on the opposite side of the end that is attached to something.  Other then that everything I saw today is something that I have photographed already or have described in my other blogs.

                                                                        Work Cited

Russell, Bruce. "Micro Invertebrates". Poster displayed in lab. Knoxville, TN, Nov. 10, 2010

Day 22

          Organisms have really started to flurish, I have noticed that the diversity of organisms is increaseing.  The video shown with this post is a video of a ameba.  I looked through a few books and I could not clarify which species it was so it is labeled under Ameba sp.  Amebas are "single celled organisms" (Lee, Hunter, and Bovee 1985) that spend there life stuck to something living off what they happen to run into.  It engulfs its food like a cell receives a virus, it puts it inside of itself and it digests it over time.   They do not have flagellum to help them transport so they stretch there bodies in there designated direction forming a blob that looks like it has fingers gripping onto the surface it lays.  I also found another species of ameba, This one I found in D.J. Pattersons Free-Living Freshwater Protozoa and it is called a "peranema" (Patterson 1992).  Peranema's have a long flagellum coming out of the front of its body, they "squirm actively, especially when feeding" and the "pellicle is finely ridged" (Patterson 1992).   This in my opinion has been the neatest thing I have found yet.  It was a pretty fast mover and seemed to run into every organism around it, seeing if it could possible eat it.


                                                                          Works Cited
Lee JJ, Hunter SH, Bovee EC. 1985.  An Illustrated Guide to the Protozoa. Lawrence (KS): p. 160.

Patterson DJ. 1992. Free-Living Freshwater Protozoa. New York (NY). p. 51

Day 15

There has been a dramatic change in the amount of organisms in my micro-aquarium since food has been added to the aquariums.  As soon as I looked through the microscope I seen a abundance of life swimming around and munching on plant materials.  Just as last week, there are still hundreds if not thousands of rotifers swimming around, but this week for the first time I noticed a oval shaped organism named a Tachysoma floating around eating off the food that was inserted into the aquarium.  It is surrounded with "immotile dorsal bristles" that sometimes get confussed with "cirri" (Patterson page 125).  The video above is of a Lakowitziuna Rotifer that I found last week.  The last thing I studied during the time I had in the lab was a organism called a "paramecium" ( Patterson page 133), from what I saw it was a circular organism that resembled a human brain, and was very slow moving.


                                                                               Work Cited
Patterson, D. J. Free-Living Freshwater protozoa: A Colour Guide. New York: Manson, 1996.

Day 8

Day 8 of this experiment I tried to see how the diversity is in the micro-aquariums.  The first thing I found was a crab like organism called Seed Shrimp.  This organism is in the Animalia kingdom, Arthropoda Phylum, Crustacea subphylum, and the Ostracoda class.  The Seed Shrimp I observed seemed to be a scavenger, all it did was move around fairly quickly eating everything in sight.  If it didn't find it tasty it just spit it back out.  The next thing I observed was Lakowitziuna Rotifer.  This Rotifer was very small and just swam around with no sense of direction trying to find something to eat that is smaller then itself.  The last thing I looked at during my time in the lab was a Philodina Rotifer, its actions were similar to the Lakowitziuna Rotifer, but the Philodina was about twice the size, and more of an oval shape, while the Lakowitziuna was more circular.

DAY 1- Making the Micro-aquariums

This being the first day of the project we first needed to put the micro-aquariums together.  After the professor passed out the equipment needed, he then gave us the choice of what water source we would like to use.  I chose number 13, which is the plastic bird bath.  I then filled the micro-aquarium about 3/4 full with just enough soil to cover the bottom of the aquarium.  After that I then put about a inch of plant A and plant B into the aquarium, so the bacteria would have oxygen.  Once I finished with that I took a look at it under the microscope.  I seen some organisms move in a circular motion to get from one place to another.  I also seen a organism that camped out on plant A waiting on a smaller piece of bacteria to swim by, then it would snatch it from the air.  The last thing I saw were the forzacillas moving in and out, reminded me of a ballon on a string getting pushed down then floating back out.