Final Day

Today was the last day observing my microaquarium™.  Surprisingly enough I found my midge again!  The cyclops is still alive and I also saw another worm like creature that was see through and had cilia up and down its body. There were other small organisms still swimming around in the tank, but like the previous days, life is declining for sure.   This was a fun experiment, spent a lot of time in the lab, but now it is time to write my lab report and wrap this semester up!

Day 4: Nothing much

On my fourth week observing my aquarium, I am noticing that there really is not much to see anymore.  I do not know what happened to all my little organisms but they aren't there anymore!  Since my Cyclops is still alive, I think I'll blame it for eating all of the other ones.  Or maybe the fish food?  I'm not sure, but there was something that caught my eye, though I think it was just an attachment on one of my plants. 

Just something very interesting.  The part that caught my eye was the small head looking part of this bulge, and the little dots inside that.  It almost looks like a brain! 
The next picture is of a filamentous green alga, I am not sure which one but I will figure it out!

I love the bright green in it and since I wasn't able to find much else, I thought I would capture this.  And last but not least is something I've found this Cyanobacteria, Merismopedia sp. that is shaped like small squares.

I thought it was pretty sweet and I've been watching these since the beginning of lab!  So that is all for now, I'm hoping that i will be able to find something else before this is over, but we'll see.

Day 3

This weeks lab time was not very eventful.  Though we did add Atison's Betta Foodsome to our tanks it did not seem to change much. The food is made by Ocean Nutrition, Aqua Pet Americas, in Salt Lake City, UT. The ingredients include: Fish meal, wheat flower, soy meal, krill meal, minerals, vitamins and preservatives. Analysis: Crude Protein 36%; Crude fat 4.5%; Crude Fiber 3.5%; Moisture 8% and Ash 15%. (McFarland, 2012)  

There were many little organisms floating around this time, which came from the added food.  They were swimming very fast and there were probably thousands of them.  One of the bigger things I saw was a Cyclops. It is a micro invertebrate and is shaped kind of like a little lobster.  Another interesting thing I noticed was the fact that the Vorticella sp.  had tripled in number throughout the tank. (Patterson, 2003) Seemingly smaller than before but I also was not as close as I was before.  Probably the most interesting creature I found was the Midge.  It was very large and I could actually see it with my own eyes, and then once I looked through the microscope I could see inside of it.  It is segmented, and is considered an insect larvae.  It would go through the dirt and come up to feed on the Amblestegium sp. plant and the organisms formed on the plant.  It was so interesting to watch it feed, since it had a mouth and appeared to be chomping on the branches and it's "chin" has little hairs or cilia on it.  It kind of reminded me of a muppet, although it is very different!  Other than that, my tank was not as interesting and also I could not find my mystery creature.  But I will try again and hopefully get to identify it.