Blog 1-Week 1

Well here we go...

I used water source number 4 and then used both Plant A and Plant B to set up my aquarium being careful to get enough dirt but not too much. The water had these little green specs floating in it, I am not sure what they are yet, but they are kinda odd.

To the naked eye I couldn't see much of anything moving in the water, there was something very small and clear jumping around very quickly.

I was absolutely amazed when we started to look at the aquariums under the microscopes the first day. (Oct. 15th) I got to see a few almost heart shaped organisms with flagella swimming around probably about 4 or so. I now think they are a type of Euglanoid which is a type of freshwater Algae that flips around and actually will crawl along the plants.
I then went on Wednesday October the 22th.

I also got to see the plant bladders on Plant B, that apparently will swallow the microorganisms and eat them, kinda sad but really cool to think about. You can also see the curled ends of the plants which are called fiddle heads.

I also got to see a couple cyclops that had these two tiny bright red eyes and the tendrils sticking out the front of it, one of them were not moving and just passively floating, but another one was darting all over the place.

Then I got to see these long thin green strips of Green Alga that had all of these tiny sections could have been something like green Filamentas Alga.

There were several yellow circular organisms. One was definitely cellular and moved ever so slowly every now and then almost twitched about, but we are not sure what it was, it could be something like a tachysoma. Then there were other yellow disks that had these 4 little dark spots in it, maybe a pollen grain because it wasn't moving?

I also saw this spinning thing that Dr. MacFarland identified as a rotifer carcass attached to a small dark circular organism that we didn't know what it was that was cause the carcass to spin like that.

There was also this worm looking creature that did not move in an S shaped motion but instead seemed to curl up or perhaps inch along. Still unsure as to what it was.

There are several very small round creatures that are too small to identify, but will hopefully grow more so we can get a better idea of what they are.

It looks like there could be some cillates such as paramecium. But we will keep an eye out for those as they get more visible

So that pretty much sums up my first week.