Well, I hope that everyone had a great Spring break. Mine was wonderful; we went to New Mexico for a full week of farm fresh life. There is nothing like hearing the rooster’s cock-a-doo-doodle in the early morn and eating eggs the ways nature intended...hormone free. For once, I didn't feel bad if I didn't finish my dinner...it went into a bowl for the chickens for the next day. Mix all that up with hay, fresh ground corn, crushed oyster shell (for harder egg shells), and some other grains, these free range chickens are both happy and delicious!!
I was lucky enough to have Matt help me out last week as we were gone. He was able to pull a few samples for me so that I didn't miss any new microbes or trends over the week, so thank you very much. There is so much going on with my project, every week there seems to be a new microbe to research and look at new climbing and falling numbers in populations under the microscope. I have categorized what I see into three different classifications, R for rare (population 0 - 5 per slide), C for common (population 6-15 per slide) and A for abundant (15 + per slide). This is the most effective way that I have come up with so far to keep track of population growing and declining numbers as everything that I am looking at is so small.
I am currently on day 49 and my pickle jar is beginning to show the signs of algae over-growth.
This is evident when I mount my wet slides as most of my population comes from the green and blue-green algae groups. Below are a few of my favorite pictures from this week’s slides...enjoy!!
The large dark microbe is Genera Calonei
Both blue-green algae, work-like is Oscillatoria and the ordered dots are Merismopedia
This creepy guy is a Rotifer and I'm pretty sure it is a Dicranophorus (at 40x)
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