Micro Aquarium Madness

Jacob Guillen
Micro Aquarium project Layout:
 The water source that will be used in my experiment is the water from the Fountain City duck pond, (If you wanted to search for the source of the water, you would use the name of the sample, (Fountain City Duck Pond), look it up under google maps, (under Tennessee), and it should be able to give you the adequate location.)  The amount of microorganisms must be determined first by the factors of how they arrived there. First, the water cycle,whether it was transported by natural means, or by human means, the water contained microorganisms, which have been been brought into the new environment. Another factor is by larger animals being used as carriers for the microorganisms, animals such as birds (in general), fish, and any other creatures that used the pond for their basic needs. Next to be explained is the way that the environment supports these little creatures. Larger animals again play a large role in the lives of microorganisms, as they bring and produce food for them, (unintentionally) by decay, defecation, and by carrying small particles along with them. The microorganisms also rely on plants and other microorganisms in order to receive their nourishment.

The experiment requires that a small portion of this water from the pond to be placed in a micro aquarium slide, as well as a soil sample. There are also  two different plants that are to be inserted into the slide. Plant A is Amblestegium, or moss,  hypothetically the food source for many of the microorganisms, will be put in the left side of the slide, whereas, plant B, Utricularia gibba, a flowering carnivorous plant, which may act as a predator to certain microorganisms, will be placed in the right corner of the slide. If you want to know where the plant samples came from, you could do two different techniques of searching. First, you could backtrack to the destinations of the samples before they arrive, (example: Where was Plant A obtained? From a natural spring. Where is it located? Carter Mill Road, and so on.) to make it much easier, you could also use Google maps. Another way to find the plant sample is to look up their habitat range, then make the assumption that it was produced in Tennessee ( if Tennessee is in its range of habitat) because of its convenience of area, (AKA, it is convenient if harvested closer in-state.) then you would  find what habitat it requires to survive, then look up on the map for regions that are capable of creating this environment.  Currently in the slide, there are two microorganisms that I have found, one of which I found while using the 4x magnification, the smaller organism was spotted using the 10x magnification. Now that the experiment is set up, I will review the changes within the following week.