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