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:
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:
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.
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.
***
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.
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.
I. In Mrs. Loher's room I looked through the microscope at some of the water from the tank with the water bug. At first I had the microscope focused so I could see the cells of the duckweed which looked like -- instead of being squares -- they looked like circles. And then I noticed that whatever the little creatures were in the water, they could somehow move around through what looked like jet propulsion and had small little tails. I could faintly see what looked like their internal organs, but it was kind of hard.
II. There are two beaver lodges by my house. One is right by the mouth of Hoisington Brook, and the other is in a swamp out back of and old red house near us. We can see the one by the brook from our living room. The one by the brook washes away sometimes when the brook gets too strong. Last spring I saw one of the beavers probably from the swamp over by the marina. I have also seen muskrats and minks and many other creatures near the marina.
