PeterLab

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.

First drawing of a copepod and a diatom

Copepod:

Diatom:

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.