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.