Observation 4

Hello readers! This past week on Friday November the 5th is when I went in and made my observations, I noticed that many of the organisms that I had seen the previous week had seem to have just vanished! It was as if they were almost never there. I could still see a few of them but most were just gone. (Daphnia) I think they must have just lived out there life cycle I guess, or did not get enough nutrients to survive. I did however see a Chaetogaster, which is a long worm that was just swimming around not doing much, but what i did find out however is that it is closely related to the regular earth worm! I have attached an URL to a video where you can watch the Chaetogaster in action, it just one eating some smaller organism it seems but it is still very interesting because you can see whatever it ate in side it. http://www.microscopyu.com/moviegallery/pondscum/chaetogaster/videos/chaetogaster01ob.mpg

Observation 3

Hello this is for the week of October 24th, didn't have access to a computer until today so, I apologize to all my readers out there who wanted to know what happened last week while I was making my observations! On October 22nd one Beta Food Pellet was added into my micro aquarium. ("Atison's Betta Food" made by Ocean Nutrition, Aqua Pet Americas, 3528 West 500 South, Salt Lake City, UT 84104. Ingredients: Fish meal, wheat flower, soy meal, krill meal, minerals, vitamins and preservatives. Analysis: Crude Protein 36%; Crude fat 4.5%; Crude Fiber 3.5%; Moisture 8% and Ash 15%). I didn't have a lot of time to observe the aquarium but there was a lot of activity due to the increase in food for the organisms. All I had time to write down was that there just seemed to be more activity overall by the organisms.

Day 2 Observations

Hello readers! I know you have been anxiously waiting for my next entry; and I am delighted to inform you that your wait is over! I went in today to make my next rounds of observations and I saw some very interesting sights. First thing I noticed was that there were a few air bubbles that had shown up since last week. Also there was a bit of plant deterioration, this may have been from the micro organisms that I saw on them, it looked as if they were eating the plant. I observed what I believe is  Daphnia which is a small aquatic crustacean which is also referred to as "water fleas". Below is a picture that I found off the internet of a Daphnia.

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Here is the URL for the site where I found the picture (http://cfb.unh.edu/cfbkey/html/Organisms/CCladocera/FDaphnidae/GDaphnia/Daphnia_rosea/daphniarosea.html).

I also noticed that some of the dirt that I had put at the bottom of the container had gone away. This was the result of an Annelid, which is a small worm that was moving through the dirt and eating it. I also noticed that there were a lot of loose fibers floating around in the free space in the tank. Also i saw a small rotifer which I later learned was a Philodina and it was just sifting through the water looking for nutrients. To the right are the spores that the Daphnia release to reproduce! (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK2043/)

Term Project Day 1 observations and set up!

Hello and welcome to my blog! This first entry is to just give you a heads up on what this blog is all about. So first off we in my Biology 111 lab are making miniature aquariums which will be home to many micro-organisms and over the next few weeks we will observe them and take nots on there activities. Alright so first we had to set up our MicroAquariums, so first we got our micro aquariums which is basically 2 glass sheets glues together. We then proceeded to fill it with a water source of our choosing out of the 13 available sources. I selected source 6 which was from Spring Creek off Woodson Dr runing throught Dean's Woods Road frontage., Knox Co. Tennessee. Partial shade exposure. Tennessee River water Shed N35 55.274 W083 56.888 848 ft 10/10/2010. We had to take a small dropper and suck up some water from the bottom of the container, the middle and lastly from the top. We then had to label our aquariums with our initials and used color coded dots so we would know which tank was ours. We lastly put some small water plants into it so that we could observe their interaction with the organisms living in the water. 


Observations:
My first day of observations were very limited due to the fact I spent most of the period setting up the aquarium but i did observe some small organisms swimming around, but that was basically all there was to see or at least all I had time to see.