I got to proceed with my third observation on my MicroAquarium since I constructed it a few weeks back. As a quick recap, the past few weeks I had been unable to really observe and see much activity in my MicroAquarium, mostly due to no real food source present and the organism were just floating around in the MicroAquarium. It has been difficult to search the MicroAquarium for a hour or so and observe not much activity. Lucky, this week's observation was much different!
The reason of my joy, and anticipation, of this weeks observation was that after my second observation, Dr. McFarland placed a food pellet into my MicroAquarium. Even though I could not see directly the food pellet, for it had already dissolved, the presence of the food pellet being placed was easily known initially from the first look! I was able to get access to the microscope with the camera attached and as I observed my MicroAquarium, I quickly noticed that the level of activity in the MicroAquarium drastically changed from last week to this current week! So exciting!!
Right away my eyes were quickly drawn to the multiply clusters of Lembadion sp. (Rainis, Russell 1996) that made their presence known all across my MicroAquarium. I spent most of my time observing the Lembadion sp. - mostly due to volume (in numbers) of Lembadion sp. in the MicroAquarium compared to the other species/organisms present - which allowed for me to be able to get some good pictures of them, like the one pictured below in Figure 2!
However, one of the coolest observations that I made is shown in Figure 1, a Chaetogaster sp. The past observations that I have made I have not been able to observe any 'larger' organisms besides than the Lambadion sp. (this week) and the Colpidium sp. (last week), so when I saw the Chaetogaster sp. towards the end of my observation, I became really excited!! Yay-- I may actually have some 'real life' in my MicroAquarium! Reading the Guide to Microlife book, I learned that the Chaetogaster sp. prefer to live in muddy debris along streams, ponds, marshes, and soggy-gounds (Rainis, Russell 226). Furthermore, I also found out that they their body is divided into segments, where the first two segments serve as the head (Rainis, Russell 226). I loved getting to look at the Chaetogaster sp. whip its body region around and curl back on itself-- from doing so I was able to snap a picture of its whole body, as shown below in Figure 1.
Finally, I was also able to observe a Peranema sp. in my MicroAquarium as well. I found these little fellows really exciting to watch because they seemed to glide through the water rather than swim while having a long single flagellum protruding from the frontier region of their body (Patterson 52)!
Overall, I was really pleased with my third observation this week! I was able to see a increase in activity in my MicroAquarium from last week to this week, plus an increase in species actively present in the MicroAquarium! It was cool to really see what a difference a food source could do/can make in an environment-- hopefully it will continue to increase as the weeks progress!
Figure 1. Displays the Chaetogaster sp. full body length.
Figure 2. Displays Lembadion sp. around pieces of the added food pellet. Note the large vacuole.
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