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:

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.

Onion cells & duckweed cells

I've noticed that not all plant cells are the same. Some plant cells, such as onion cells, have that rigid shape that you see in text books; but some other plant cells such as duckweed cells have a more rounded shape.

Here are a couple of views of onion cells:

For contrast, here are cells from a duckweed leaf:

The duckweed cell walls are thick, but they aren't rectangles, like the cell walls of the onion cells.