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.