PeterLab

Microscope time, February 11th & 9th

In January, we scooped up some lake water and sediment samples near the mouth of Hoisington Brook in Westport, NY. We looked at it under the microscope and there wasn't much to see. We left it in a clean fish tank for a few weeks and we same many microorganisms including algae, paremeciums, vorticella, and some things that look like egg cases. 

This is a video of a paramecium feeding on algae.  There are also a couple of voticella at the beginning. The paramecium and some other organisms were found in a water sample from Lake Champlain.

These are some kind of egg cases.

 

Here is a video of a vorticella:

Tracking under the bridge

On Tuesday we walked down through the underpass next to Hoisington Brook to look at the snow on the underpass for tracks. There were tracks on the ice under the bridge.

Diatoms and Other Things Seen under the Microscope

I looked at more of Mrs. Lohers Pond water, this time I did see creatures swimming in it, so so the copepods might have survived the tank drying out, but there weren't any in the water sample on my slide, or I couldn't find them anyway. But I did see a number of diatoms and some other strange things.

Diatoms:

Plus some things we haven't identified:

We're not sure if this is a bubble or what it is:

We think this may be algae. We're not sure:

I also spent some time looking at fungi we found on a piece of firewood:

We asked people to guess what this was and they guessed things like a shag carpet, the surface of the sun, and  the inside of a butternut squash. It is the the roots of a shelf fungus:

I took this picture myself.

Bird Identifying

On the second time we went tracking with D T-T, it was kind of hard to walk in the snow because it was up to just below my knees out by the shore. Also it was a little windy and so they weren't very good conditions for going outside that day. I had to rest a lot.

The birds were not so close to shore, but we saw a number of different kinds: there seem to have been Common Mergansers and Mallards, and also Pied Billed Grebes. We looked them up in National Geographic Complete Birds of North America. We also saw a bald eagle fly out towards the bay from somewhere over near the marina.

Some of the birds were diving under water, maybe to catch fish.

The ice in the lake sounded like glass bottles clinking together. It is called brash ice.

How to list species sightings with Audubon Guides Online

We were looking at the Audubon site , when we noticed a cool new feature: You can report your own wildlife sightings!!!

First you go to the main audubonguides.com page and click on Online Guides. The Sightings button is on the left directly below the Home button. Click on  that.

Then you have to make an account and log in. And then you can start reporting sightings which go into a searchable database with everbody else's sightings.

Birds observed through the window on a very cold morning

This morning, when we got up it was very cold, only 1 degree F, which is 31 degrees below freezing. There was white crystal ice on all the trees. After the sun came up, it was still very foggy outside but there seemed to be a lot of birds flitting in and out of the fog.

When the fog cleared away a bit, we noticed  that there seemed to be a current of warmer water (by which we mean warmer than the surrounding lake water) at the mouth of Hoisington Book, and any where else on the water there was a thin layer of ice. 

The kinds of birds we observed include:

• gulls (hundreds of them)
• loons
• crows
• chickadees
• geese
• ducks
• sparrows

Gulls (notice that some of the gulls out there on the water are standing up):

Loons: UPDATE: After looking more at the guides we think those were mergansers.

closeup:

Crow:

Canada geese:

We just discovered that we can report these bird sightings on the Audubon Society website.

Learning to photograph through the microscope

On Wednesday, I practiced taking pictures through the microscope. How I do it is I have to position the camera lens over the microscope eye piece so that they line up so that the camera can get a good picture of what is in the microscope. My camera is an Insignia 10 megapixel with 3x optical zoom. It has a very small lens, which is why we can use it for this purpose, and an LCD display on the back.

Here are some of the pictures I took.

Snow crystals:

Snake skin:

Moss:

The edge of the giant waterbug's body:

Up until now, my mom has taken the photographs through the school microscope for me. Now I can take the photos myself.

Tracking #1

[MAP]

On Tuesday, we went to the shoreline down by Hoisington Brook near the beaver lodges with D T-T, and we saw lots of tracks in the snow, including

• grey squirrel tracks
• red fox tracks and urine marker
• unidentified small bird tracks 
• great blue heron tracks

We saw a great blue heron and many ducks.

Fox tracks:

Grey squirrel tracks

Bird tracks crossing fox tracks:

 

Great blue heron tracks and my footprints

We didn't see any beaver tracks, but we did see small trees that has been gnawed by beavers.

While we were out we took sediment and water samples to try to breed copepods with.

We checked the tracks against the listing in Scats and Tracks of the Northeast: A Field Guide to the Signs of Seventy Wildlife Species by James C. Halfpenny and Jim Bruchac.

Today, after the snow storm, we went out for a walk and looked for animal tracks in the same area. The fox didn't seem to have been around, but there were definitely a lot of gull tracks at the mouth of Hoisington Brook.

We didn't see any heron tracks, but we did see the heron.

I think the same one has lived down there for years. I wrote a poem about the heron that hangs out at the mouth of the brook a few years ago.

Trying to culture our own copepods

We got some instructions on how to find copepods in the winter, and so we have gotten out an old fish tank and put small flower pots filled with Lake Champlain sediment from the mouth of Hoisington Brook -- some from beaver lodge #1 and some from the nearby sandbar -- and some lake water into the fish tank. It would work better if we had an air stone, which we hope to get soon. We don't see any copepods yet, but we're hoping.

We think our copepods are Cyclops

The copepods we have found seem to be something called Cyclops. 

We thought they were were cyclops bicuspidus thosmasi. They are not Cyclops bicuspidus thomasi, because those are identified by a certain tail structure, and our tails are a little different. The thomasi tail is identified like this:

(Illustration from Central Michigan University's Zooplankton of the Great Lakes.)

Our copepod tails looks like this:

A (the Rami) is too short and fat. B (the lateral setae) is in about the right place but is barely visible, and C (the inner setae) is so tiny it is almost invisible.

We think it is a Cyclops because of the eye, which we thought was a brain when we saw it under the microscope. According to Wikipedia,

The name Cyclops comes from the Cyclops of Greek mythology which shares the quality of having a single large eye, which may be either red or black in Cyclops.

On ours the eye is red, and we've seen it on all the copepods we've looked at up close.

Also, in a previous post, I said we thought we had two species of copepods. But those to variations seem to be the male and female. Cyclops bicuspidus is sexually dimorphic. The males look like they have crab claws instead of antennae or sort of like the grabbing front legs of a water bug. The females just have antennae.

The picture above is a female.

This is a male:

And this is a female:

We need to do more research in order to find a species match for the tail structure.

We also need to collect water samples to get copepods from different places, though it may be too cold at this time of year to catch them.

First drawing of a copepod and a diatom

Copepod:

Diatom:

More Copepods

I can find copepods in  the pond water in Mrs. Loher's classroom, but it isn't as easy as it seems, I can't just get one every time. I have to look very carefully for some of the specs in the water moving. Then I have to capture them with the eye dropper. There seems to be more  than one species of copepod in the pond water.

The copepods we've been finding seem to have a red spot which seems to be either their brain or their heart:

Here's another example, a different copepod from a different day:

Note that the difference in the front appendages show that they are different species.

Here is a video of the heartbeat or breathing of the copepod.

This one looks like it's been eating something green. Algae, maybe?

And here's a view of  the hairs on the copepod's tail:

Baby Salmon in Mrs. Loher's classroom

In Mrs. Loher's room, there's a tank with cold water and baby salmon it it. They've only recently hatched, and so they have small sacks on their stomachs which makes it look like they have some sort of stomach sack buldging down.  This means they can't swim very well yet, and they get tired out easily and have to take a rest after a few seconds of swimming.

Here's a video:

Another red water mite, but this one was dead

This water mite was easier to photograph, because it seemed to have died or run out of air in some way. So it held still for the camera. Even are we accidentally popped it while getting it onto a microscope slide, we still got good photos.

Here it is with a piece of duckweed, looking very tick-like:

Here's a closer view:

Here are two views showing the hairs on the legs of the mite:

I'm not sure what the hairs are for, but they might be used as swimming paddles along with its legs.

Diatoms

Looking at samples of pond water, I noticed what appeared to be diatoms. I'm not sure if they are, but they might be.

This is a picture of one of  them:

We saw some other geometric things under the microscope that may have been diatoms, but didn't get pictures of them.