Week 4, Final

My little tank's water levels were dreadfully low, and I worried at first that perhaps my cyclops and aeolosoma may have gotten caught out of the water and died. When I checked them out under the microscope, however, I found an aeolosoma wriggling about just fine, and eventually my cyclops was back to darting around, as well. There are definitely less amoeba now, and one of the bladders on the carnivorous plant, Utricularia gibba, is an oddly deep bluish-purple shade. I wonder if that means that that bladder died? When I tried to look up information on the matter, I mostly ended up sifting through lots of different types of the plant with different colored bladders, so that wasn't very helpful.

My cyclops did not want to stay still at all, but he seems to be about the same size as last week. I couldn't find more than one aeolosoma, though I'm not sure if the others have died or are just hiding from me. I can't really scour every last crevice of the tank for them, so it's very possible that I just didn't see them, but they certainly seem to be less in number, regardless. The very low water levels may be partially at fault for this. There is definitely less amoeba than there were at the start of the project, but I wouldn't necessarily say much less than last week.

Week 3

I didn't get to stay long because I came in late. I have work pretty much all the time if I'm out of class, so it's hard to find times to wiggle in to come to visit my little aquarium.

Anyway, so I went in to check out my critters, and I feel like my cyclops got bigger! It may just be my imagination, though. It's possible the added nutrients from the food pellet that was added on the 22nd did help him out a bit, right? Though it didn't seem to be in the water for very long, the food pellet. I don't have any pictures from last week of my cyclops, so there's no real way to judge. Today, however, I did get a neat video of him. I was recording a video of an aeolosoma in my tank, when I caught him on camera, then chased him a bit for a good shot of him. At Dr. McFarland's suggestion, I split the videos so that I have one of my aeolosoma, and one of my cyclops.

Aeolosoma:



Cyclops:



From checking out a few of the other blogs by other students, I'm a little sad about how little diversity there is in my tank! I only seem to have my one cyclops, a few aeolosoma, and lots of amoeba. Speaking of amoeba, there seems to be less of them now. Perhaps the carnivorous Utricularia gibba has been eating them? They do seem to wiggle on over its pods often when I examine them. I assume that's what's going on, anyway.

That's about all I have today.