Week Four

This week wasn't much different than the last week but I noticed that some of my organisms had died. I couldn't find nearly aything near the bottom but the open water was completely full of small organisms. They were a lot more dense than last week. Another interesting thing that I found was that there was different planes of organisms when I looked at it in the microscope. I assume that is because som organisms clung to one side of the glass while the others clung to the other glass. I also found a lot of colonial diatoms that were not present last week. A lot more protists were present also.

I think that the reason that the organisms were more prevalent near the middle is because there is a lot of cyanobactria which produce food for the other heterotrophic organisms. Other than that though no changes have occured and it seems that my aquarium has reached a stagnent stage.

11/4 Third Week

So I didn't get pictures this week because they got lost on the camera somehow so the ones I put up are from online of what I think i saw. When I first got my aquarium, a signigicant amount of water was gone. Also, in the middle I noticed there to be a lot more gonyostomums. These are multicellular and they eren't moving. I saw other organisms inside of them so I assumed that they were heterotrophs. I also saw a lot more smaller organism than last time. They were so small though that even under the highest power you couldn't tell them apart. Also, a lot more filaments were present near the middle. I noticed a lot of colonies of things which I will identify.

The first pictury is somewhat of the colonies that I have seen. This was a anacystis that I found on the website
http://www.biologie.uni-hamburg.de/b-online/library/webb/BOT311/Cyanobacteria/Anacystir.jpg and it looked quite similar to what I was observing. There were a lot of these and they were found in the middle and did not appear to be green.

The second picture was something called a gloeocapsa. I found this picture on the website http://home.manhattan.edu/~frances.cardillo/plants/monera/gleocap.html. We thought it was a gloeocapsa because of the way that each cell was inhibited by a different "sheath". Some of them had two nucelui in one though and that's because they were still in the process of dividing. I saw a ton of these that were in the middle and had never been present earlier. They are part of the cyanobacteria family. The gloeocapsa is a free moving organism that moves in whatever it's membrane goes. It's contstantly changing shapes. It had engulfed a lot of organsims so it was a heterotroph.

I also saw a gonium. According to the books in the lab its a colony of circular or subquadrangala plates. It lives in shalls waters of ponds as swamps which is probably why I observed it.

Everything else that I saw was the same as before just in larger quanities. The biggest thing that I'm noticing though is that most of the new organism and even the old ones seem to be growing the best in the middle where there is free water and a few plants to feed off of. Not much has been going on at the bottom, it's all mostly towards the top.