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.
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:
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.
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:
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.
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:
After that we could use the microscope with Photo Booth. That was cool because Photo Booth has a bunch of special effects (see last post). But we still get picture at only 640 X 480, which wasn't big enough.
My mom fiddled around with QuickTime, which in principle should be talking to the microscope if we got Photo Booth to work. She found a menu that helped: QUCIKTIME > PREFERENCES > RECORDING. The Video Source needed to be set to "Celestron Digital Microscope." The Qulaity needed to be set to "Device Native." Then we could record at 1.3 megapixels.
Then we can record video through QuickTime and the video comes out as 1280 X 1024 video, which is the size of image we want.
The only problem is that you get a video rather than a still image. The solution to this (so far) is to stretch the Quicktime playback window out to full size, and use Preview to make a screen shot of the window.
I still might need a small bit of help with it right now because this process is more complicated than I'm used to. But once we have the pictures we can put them in other programs, such as Corel Painter, and adjust the light and color tones in the picture. So this is a lot better than just 640 X 480 with some special effects.
Here is a picture from this morning of a shell that I picked up at the beach a while back. We looked it under the microscope. We were surprised to find these tiny shells attached to it instead of just little holes. the tiny shells seemed to be inside holes on the big shell. Some them look like clams and others of them look like snail shells. We never knew they were there before.
And here's some of the tiny shells close up:
(My mom did most of the work figuring out how to get the microscope functioning properly.)
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.
