Week 1

Today we started up my MicroAquarium Term Project. The first step in this initial state was to assemble our aquariums. The aquariums are two glass slides hot glued together to create a water tight microscope slide. After this we had a choice of 12 water dishes to retrieve our samples for our aquarium... I choose the sample from the French Broad River... We then placed our sample water in the aquarium and placed two plants to see how the micro-organisims react to the growth of these plants in our sample water.

After we had our MicroAquarium set up we then observed what we saw... My aquarium had a thin layer of dirt on the bottom (approximately 3 mm). Right above this thin layer of dirt lays one "blob". This "blob" fell off of Plant B. The next layer up is Plant A and Plant B. Plant A is on the left center of the slide and Plant B is on the right center portion. Above this is more water. Now under the microscope is a whole different story; an internal constantly moving relam. I've never seen so many little particles moving around before... The sight of them was amazing. It reminded me of a whole little galaxy where each micro-organisim seemed to have a job of some sort. Although I haven't saw any functions of them so far, it was cool just watching these see-through, oval shapped organisms fly by my sight. I followed the biggest one I saw and was gasping at how unreal looking it was. A see-through bubble that had about 20 other bubbles inside of it, that were all different sizes, that "swam" through the water in no organized path and every once in a while it would rotate so I could see it all in 3-D. It almost looked like a computer generated ball of flubber that just spun around and was always moving, while at the same time the little bubbles inside moved along with it. Needless to say I don't know what this is or what it's purpose is, but I intend on learning. I also saw a few other micro-organisms and was awhhed by them too. One was a see-through tube, called a nematode, that seemed to have one end attached to a certain spot in the open water and the other half flailing around like an uncontrolled fire hose. The other micro-organism I happened to get a peak at resembled a snake. It had a snake shapped head from a birds eye view and the body was connected together by multiple hexograms to form this snake like figure. This micro-organism didn't move that much, maybe thats why I only saw one, it kinda just lingured by Plant B as if it were waiting on it's prey to arrive. That would be awesome if it ate something! But the coolest thing that caught my eye was that "Blob" that settled right above the dirt. Have you ever saw one of those electric balls that sends bolts of elecricity from the center to the surface? Well that is what this looked like, the only down side is that the unknown bolts didn't move, they were stationary.