Botany Lab Project: November 2007

Well, this is the 4th week of blogs and everything is going CRAZY! The entire food pellet is gone without a trace. Most of the organisms are down towards the bottom of the aquarium, but a few are hanging out around the moss. Also, the cyanobacteria, has changed shape again with most of them in a vertical line.

First, I will start with the things that are falling in population. The thing that had the most drastic drop in population was the Chlamydamonas. I guess that they are a good food source for the things that grew in population. Another thing that had a large decrease in population, probably for the same reason, was the Paramecium. Other organisms of note were Rotifers and Halteria.

Most of the other creatures in the micro-aquarium grew in population, except for the Gastrotrichs which stayed stable. The organisms that grew, but not as impressively as some, were the Amphipods, Diatoms, and Cyanobacteria. But there were 3 organisms that had a large increase. They were the Daphnia, Cyclops, and Seed Shrimp. There were many more Daphnia than I had ever seen in place. The Cyclops also had a large jump in population and it was impossible to even make a guess as to how many there were. The Seed Shrimp also grew very impressively in numbers. I thought that they would have died of with only 1 or 2 in the aquarium, but I was wrong. In my final count there were 8, but there is a large possibility that there were more.

Seed Shrimp

Picture found at

http://www.sacsplash.org/critters/ostracod.htm

This week, one pellet of fish food was added to the aquarium. On Thursday October 25, 2007 one pellet of "Atison's Betta Food" was added to each Micro Aquaria. It is 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%.

This fish food made a very large change in the amount of organisms observed. There was a lot of movement around the food that consisted mostly of rotifers, paramecium, diatoms, and what look like halteria. There were about 50 rotifers, 100’s of paramecium, thousands of diatoms and hundreds of halteria. Some other things that I saw in the area of the fish food were chlamydomonas and daphnia. There were countless chlamydomonas, but I only saw about 5 daphnia. One very interesting thing that I noticed was that the amphipods tended to stay away from the fish food and stayed in the muck at the bottom of the aquarium. Some other usuals were the copepods and the seed shrimp, but this time, I could tell without a doubt that this was a different one because it was smaller than the other had been. I do not know what became of the other seed shrimp.

There was one knew thing that I saw in the aquarium. At first I thought it was a rotifer cruising along, but after a closer look I could tell that it had a different, more fluid movement pattern. It seemed to glide along, and was hard to keep up with and get a sketch of, but after a few minutes of persistence, I was able to get a sketch and identify it. It is an organism in the phyla Gastrotricha. And after I had examined more of the aquarium, I saw about 20 more of them. It seemed like they fed by moving and their mouths had cilia that moved the food into their body.

One thing that I found interesting was that all of the cyanobacteria’s ends had pointed towards the light that was above them. I also a more types of cyanobacteria. There were at least 2 other types that I saw that I had not the previous week. I also noticed that the moss that I had placed into the aquarium had some new growth.

Halteria