PeterLab

Red water mite (Hydrachna)

Today I looked at a red water mite through a microscope in Mrs. Loher's room. I got it from the tank of pond water with an eye dropper. When I looked at it through the microscope, I noticed that it had long hairs to help it swim on three out of four of its pairs of legs.  It has legs like a backswimmer water bug or like the bigger water bug that Mrs. Loher had last week.

It had a redish brown body, two mouthparts, and eight hairy legs. The back six legs have long hairs pointing backwards. I could see a rather large darker blotch in the middle and some little darker spots, but didn't have a clear view of its internal organs.

I think that maybe it can become a pest if areas become overpopulated with them, but in general their role in the ecology might be (I'm not sure if I'm right) to clean up plant and animal matter, or they may be parasites, since they look like ticks with long hairs on their legs.

It was kind of easy to see because it had the red color to it. Sometimes animals have the color red or orange as a warning color, for example red efts, which are poisonous. I don't know if these are poisonous or not.

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At home, we looked again at the picture of the fruit fly that we took the other day where it seemed like we could see its internal organs. What I thought we its internal organs under the microscope now look to me like a parasite living inside the fruit fly. 

Microscopy, 12/8/10: Yeast, Fruit Fly, & Copepod

Today, I looked at a fruit fly, two kinds of yeast, and a copepod under a microscope.

Last week, I poured a glass of cider and forgot about it. And my mom noticed it was bubbling. And so we let it bubble for five days so we could see the microorganisms under the microscope. A fruit fly fell in and drowned, and so we had a fruit fly in the cider sample.

Also, for comparison, we mixed some sugar, water, and bread yeast together and let it sit in a warm place for an hour and a half. 

We brought both of these samples to school.

Fruit Fly

First, I looked at the fruit fly through the microscope, since it was bigger, and therefore easier to find, than the yeast. Here are some pictures of what I saw:

Hairs on a fruit fly wing:

The insides of the fruit fly as seen through its wing:

. . . and closer  . . . 

The fruit fly was interesting because you wouldn't expect to be able to see so many things on a fruit fly. I didn't know it had hairs on its wings or that it had antennae that looked like little clumps of hairs. I saved the slide to look at it more later.

Two Kinds of Yeast

Then I looked at the yeast. As far I could tell, there was a lot more yeast in the bread yeast mixture than in the cider. We tested the PH of each mixture. The cider had a PH of about 4.5 and the bread yeast mixture had a PH of 6.

Both kinds were easier to see when we stained it with iodine. Here's a video of what yeast looks like under the microscope.  You could only really see the yeast under the highest power (400X) of the school microscope.

Copepod

There is a giant water bug in Mrs. Loher's room at school in an aquarium. I put the giant waterbug and some water in a beaker to look at. I also noticed some microscopic white creatures in the water with it, so I got one with the eye dropper and put it on a microscope slide and looked at it under the microscope.

The creature was a copepod. It looks like a shrimp with an oval shaped body, no legs, a tail, and four little sensor hairs or something coming off of its tail. It also had antennae. Here is a video of it plus a still image from the video.

I recognized it was a copepod and we confirmed it by looking up copepods on the Internet. I had seen copepods before on a DVD series called The Blue Planet by David Attenborough. It's about ocean wildlife in places like deep sea trenches  or just very deep down in the ocean. But copepods also live in fresh water and they can even live in soil.

Next time I probably want to see if I can find any water fleas (which only look like fleas), and also learn how to measure the size of microscopic creatures.