April 26

What we have learned about algae organisms.

I learned a ton about algae this week. The various species of algae help determine water quality because some algae love pollution and would be found in an unhealthy environment, while others are found in healthy environments and clean the water.

Batrachospermum is an algae organism that is found in shaded water, soft water, no sun and cold water.
This particular algae also an indicator of clean water.


Euglena is the number one organism capible of living in poluted water/
It has an eyespot that is a photo-receptor cell that tells the Euglena where the light is for photosynthesis.


Oscillatoria is the second most tolerant to pollution.
It's name comes from the filaments that glides back and forth on it.

April 25

To focus an item in high power you will use the scanning objective which is the lowest magnification.  Then you will move to the low power objective once you've focused on it, then you can move to the high power objective.  To make a wet mount, you will take a piece of algae that can fit on the slide with a couple of drops of algae water and make sure it can fit underneath the cover slide.  To stain the slide you get the right sized iten and add 1-2 drops of stain and gently put the cover slide on top.  You will also use small paper towel and move it around underneath the slide to get rid of the excess water.  I didn't understand before the different parts of the microscope and now I know better how to properly view an object or organism.

April 24

Um I'm pretty sure Mrs. Wood has our notes on the video but she lost them and did not return them so I will just get facts of amphibians from the internet.

1.) Amphibians are devised into three groups: frogs, toads, and caecilians.
2.) There are 5,000 to 6,000 known amphibians alive today.
3.) The first Amphibians appeared approximately 370 million years ago during the Devonian Period.
4.) The largest Amphibian is the largest Chinese giant salamander.
5.) The largest number of threatened Amphibians are found in Columbia, Mexico, the Caribbean, and Ecuador.
Amphibians are reliant on water because they need it to reproduce and to protect their eggs which do not have protective shells.  When assessing water quality, Amphibians are an important consideration because the healthier the place is, the more populated that area will be of Amphibians.  If their population is decreasing, it commonly means the water is bad.

This is the Chinese Giant Salamander.  (crazy right)            

April 22

A water shed is when portion of the water falling on the land seeps into the soil or flows over the surface before entering streams and lakes. The land area that supplies water to a particular river or lake is called a watershed. We (Flower Mound) live in the Trinity water shed.  Our community benefits  from the enhanced sustainability of our land by an increasing infiltration of rainfall while reducing erosion. It also helps provide for agriculture, human consumption, industry, flood control and recreation when we manage watersheds and the water it produces.  This is why our watershed is very important.

  

April 19

Freshwater organism: Snapping Turtle

Scientific name: Chelydra serpentina 

Description: The snapping turtle is characterized by a large, rigid 

upper shell and a much smaller lower shell. It also has a very long saw toothed tail,
eyes which can be seen from directly above the head, and relatively smooth skin on top
of the head. The upper shell is tan or brown and frequently covered with mud and
algae. The lower shell is white or yellowish. The head, limbs, and tail are all brown. Females
may reach a slightly larger size than males.
Behavior: It is highly aggressive when defending itself. Whenever picked up or messed with, the snapper shoots its head forward with incredible speed, and it's mouth wide open. The jaws close with a loud crunch when the neck reaches its full length and if it grabs something it does not let go easily. 

Habitat: It is found in every aquatic situation, but prefers water with soft mud
bottoms, abundant pond vegetation, and sunken logs and branches.
Diet:  It's diet is composed of aquatic or semi-aquatic fish, amphibians fish, amphibians, crayfish, crabs, clams, snails, earthworms, insects, small mammals, unwary birds, snakes, small turtles and carrion, which is dead fish. The will also feed on plants such as Elodea, Polygonum, Nuphar, Nymphaeca and Typha.  It even eats snakes and other turtles.
The main threat to the snapping turtle is humans. In some areas humans hunt for their meat and eggs.  Also adult females are often hit by human cars. This has a negative effect on thier population because it takes a long time for females to reach maturity. Turtle eggs are also hunted by raccoon, foxes, skunks and large birds.

I chose this topic because when I was really young, my next door neighbor actually caught a snapping turtle on the side of the road once in Ohio. Then he released it back somewhere safe. How he caught it, I still have no idea.  I remember poking it with a stick and the turtle snapped it in half.
 

April 18

Are aquarium is better than it was ammonia nitrate wise but our fish arn't doing so well.  Four of our fish have died and they were all tiny Tetra fish.  We learned that tetras are not easy to take care of (we are doing everything right but they still died).  We also have Baileys small snails that are doing okay so far. But one wont come out of it's shell because we think it stressed out when we accidentally siphoned it up... whoops.  But our other one seems fine; it's actually moving around in our tanks. ONe of our yellow fish and red fish likes to hide behind a certain plant in the corner. Our water quality tests are also getting better each time.
4/9: Nitrate was 5.0 and Ammonia was 1.0
4/15: The Nitrate was 2.5 and Ammonia was .50
4/19: Nitrate was 5.0 and Ammonia was .25!
(except our nitrate went up again on 4/19)
This means our tank is cleaner because the poop factor went down I guess.  To make our tank cleaner we also added bacteria.

April 17th

Pond Organisms

In our lab experience today we found a lot of small organisms. The first one is a tiny round organism that's very hard to see.  The second one was a very small worm. Worms can be differentiated by their small proto-legs and distinct heads. And the last one we found was dead and was a little shrimp. The shrimps "Wings" are revealed to be 11 pairs of appendages that undulate and act as paddles. We did not add any organisms to our aquarium except for a snail that we found.  The snail is doing fine and is crawling around our tank.  

April 16th

Biological illustrators

are artists who draw scientifically correct

pictures of plants and animals. Some artists draw free-hand and some

use computers to create graphic art. They are important to the environment because they can draw what the creatures are and how to improve marine life by giving these drawings to aquatic helpers.

Law enforcement personnel are needed in the environmental field to

enforce the laws protecting our natural areas and wildlife. This is important to the environment because with out rules prohibiting littering or dumping any sort of waste into a marine environment, the organisms would not have a healthy life and a very unsecure environment.

Librarians

work in public and school libraries, private companies, and

government agencies, keeping track of and adding to the collections

of books, journals, maps, photographs and other materials. These people help

people find information both within and outside of the library about aquatic life and help them understand how important is is to everyone.


Biological illustrators

  Law enforcement

Librarian

April 15th (Week 3 blog)

These three things are key to the basic concept of ecological succession because ecologogical succesion means change in the species structure of a ecological community over time. Which is basically what's happening above. The community begins with few plants and animals and developes through increasing complexity until it becomes a stable community. 

This is helpful in the study of freshwater ecology because it helps to understand how plants and animals adapt and produce a stable living condition for the community. 

The term Eutrophic describes our aquarium because we have a lot of fish and no more reproduction and a stable environment for our fish to live in.

I think Lewisville lake has Mesotrophic because they may have a lot of fish that produce more fish and a lot of plants that grow from underneith.

Friday 4/12

"Freshwater Ecology" is the study the relation ships between freshwater fish organisms and their natural and cultural environments in freshwater lakes, ponds or rivers.  It's important to study because if the water isn't correctly taken care of or interfered with, it can hurt many creatures and affect our lives too.  Freshwater is basically the bane of our existence  and yet much of it has been destroyed through pollution or drought.  It is very important to study to keep freshwater safer, improve it and keep it apart of our lives.

Differences between a pond and a river. 

• A river has running water and a pond has standing water.
• A pond does not disperse water into other bodies of water but a river does.
• In the middle of the river there are more plants whereas on the outside edges of ponds their are mostly plants.
• Ponds contain floating plants that hold still whereas rivers have hold fast plants that cling on for dear life.

Thursday 4/11

What I learned about the Water Issues project

5 main things I learned is that 

1.) Meat contains much more water than a salad. (500 gallons)

2.) Conserving water is important so we all don't run out.

3.) Some ways to conserve water is to turn off your sprinkler when it's raining, time your showers, and fill up your sink when you wash the dishes, instead of keeping it running.

4.) Another thing that I learned is that the lake over by the park is pretty gross and has algea growing all around it.

5.) Lastly, I learned Zebra Mussels can get stuck in peoples boats and they actually have warning about them at lakes.

The best presentation was, I thought, Victoria, Meagan and Joe's presentation. They all took a video and did a lot of research about their project. I thought it was good to inform us about the lake and what others are missing health wise.

On our assignment I think it would have been easier to maybe to a news report on global warming to get in more information in our presentation.

Wed. 4/10

Our aquarium wasn't as clear as we liked it the first time we sifted through the rocks and stuff.  So we decided to start over and redo everything and clean it all over again.   After we cleaned it it was much clearer and we were satisfied.  When we did the ammonia test for the first time it was pretty bad with a 1.0. Being on the green side meant the tank was not habitable for our fish.  Our nitrate test was pretty good at a 5.0, which was an yellow-orange color and that means fishes are able to live in our tank. Since our nitrate result was fine we didn't have to clean our tank again.  But in order to fix the ammonia problem, we did have to add some bacteria into the water. We did add bacteria to fix the ammonia and our tank is pretty clear as of today.




(ours was a little lighter)

Tuesday 4/3

My plan for my aquarium is to have a certain number of fish (right now we have 4) with my partners Catie and Bailey.  The types of fish we have is a Neon Tetra and a Black Neon Tetra. We chose these organisms because they work well in groups of five or more and are suitable to the temperature of the water. With some fish the water either has to be colder or have a water heater or else the fish could die.

The Neon Tetra is a pelagic freshwater fish native to tropical parts of northern South America. The Neon tetra originates from western Brazil, south-eastern Colombia and eastern Peru and wild Neon Tetras can be found in the headwaters of the River Amazon, Tiger, Napo and Yarapa.

The Back Neon Tetra is a native to the Paraguay basin of southern Brazil.

 

April 4/1

I learned that to conserve water people can

•  Take timed showers
• Turn off sprinklers when it rains
• Clean dishes when you fill up sink, not keep water running.

I also learned that properties of water include specific heat, boiling point, and that freezing point is 32 degrees Fahrenheit.

I learned density is related to how well something floats. The more dense it is the more buoyant something will be.

Lastly, I learned that different pollution can effect certain animals such as plastic bags when it comes to turtles, dolphins and whales, who could think they are just jellyfish. And also plastic pellets where as birds think they're eggs to find to their babies.

  

Wed. 4/10

Examples of a Lentic System

Lake: A body of water that's surrounded by land. (sunlight on reaches a small depth)

Pond: A small body of water. (sunlight for a pond reaches all the way down)

Playa Lake: A freshwater lake that's found in the desert that results from rainwater.

Swamp: A forested wetland that's similar to a marsh or bog but has trees.

Marsh: A waterlogged area that has patches of land and grasses dispersed throughout.

Bog: Wetland covered by a thick mat of dead or decomposing plants and mosses.

Reservoir: Man made or naturally occurring body of water that's used for water supply. 

Tuesday 4/8

Observations

What makes a good observation? 

A good observation is observing something using your sight, smell, and touch possibly. Mostly, when it comes to watching our aquarium we use just sight to observe any changes or interesting things happening.

I picked one of Mrs. Wind and Mrs. Wood's tank to observe. 

I noticed that there were some fish that didn't like each other and were very territorial.  That one also had a crayfish shell that might have been due to lack of feeding the crayfish. We think that particular one was eaten by the other crayfish or fish for we couldn't find it anywhere in the tank. We also noticed after a group did a test on the tank, that the water was terrible. It was a surprise that all the fish hadn't already been dead because the water was worse then ours in ammonia (I think). This is an important part of scientific inquiry because many observations have a scientific explanation that helps scientists determine what is a healthy environment for fish.

 

Tuesday 4/9

Ammonia/nitrate test

1. We gathered supplies we needed- the test tube, ammonia #1, ammonia #2, and the water sucker thingy.

2. We cleaned the test tube with the water from the aquarium we planned to test.

3. Next we filled the test tube to 5 mL with the tank water.

4. Add 8 drops of ammonia #1

5. Add 8 drops of Ammonia #2 

6. Mix it up

7. Wait 5 minutes 

8. Compare color with the freshwater card.

Nitrate Test

1. Grab the test tube nitrate 1 nitrate 2 and the water sucker thingy again.

2. Clean the test tube

3. Fill the tube to 5 mL

4. Add 10 drops of Nitrate

5. Shake Nitrate #2 for 30 seconds

6. Add 10 drops of Nitrate #2

7. Mix for 1 minute

8. Wait for 5 minutes

9. Compare color with the card.

            

Nitrate comes from the fish waste and if we don't clean our tanks our fish could get poisoned. 

Ammonia can come from tap water or decomposition water in the tanks. It can cause issues with the fishes organs and lead to death if not watched over.

Friday 4/3

Aquarium

Procedures (and materials included) : In order to get our fish ready for the aquarium we had to 

1. Grab sifters and clean the rocks- no soap

2. Put the clean rocks in a very large bucket while we worked on the dirty ones.

3. When all the rocks were cleaned we poured water in the tanks to scrub it with a sponge.

4. Scrub corners side and bottoms. 

5. Rinsed out tank.

6. Poured all the cleaned rocks into the bottom of our tank and smoothed them out.

7. Put in our decorations (buddah, Volcano, Grass, Dolphin with "no fishing" sign, and another plant)

8. Poured water in until a bout a inch from the top.

9. Put in conditioner, dechlorinator.

10. Plugged in volcano and watched bubbles come out

11. Fixed placing of our decorations.

Purpose: To make a clean and healthy environment for our fish.

Thurs. 4/4

Water Properties

My water property demo was the water cycle.  For our demonstration we set up an already created water cycle demonstration object that our teachers had nicely lended to us. :) We then put ice in the cloud holder and put a light on it to create condensation.  When it was our turn it did create condensation but did not rain a whole like like we wanted because it needed to sit under the light a ton longer.  And also our light broke when it tipped over but thankfully the ice did condense.

I've learned many different things about water properties.  When Joe and Victoria presented their demonstration in class I learned that fish use buoyancy and salt water makes the water more dense so you are more buoyant.  The more salty it is the more dense and buoyant you will be.  

Also, I learned what a solute and solvent is with Kaitlin and Kendall's demonstration. 1.) A solute is whats dissolved into another substance. 2.) A solvent is a component of the solution in which other substances dissolve, such as water.

When Colton and Mauricio and Mathew did there experiment, we learned that cohesion is grouping of water in one drop, adhesion was when water stuck to different things, and soft water creates more suds with soap than salt water.  It was important to marine life because it's hard for sea grasses to survive in hard water. The water has to be soft, according to them.

This basically summarizes what we learned that day, we learned tons more because their were over 20 people but these are just samples of what we did.

This will help me with my aquarium project because maybe some fish can't survive in salt water because of how buoyant it is or maybe there's certain solutes that can't be mixed in to the water if the fish are able to survive.  The different projects model a real ecosystem in different ways because all of these things are involved in different aquatic lifestyles.

   

Tuesday 4/4

The Water Cycle

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzY5-NZSzVw

The video I just posted is a demonstration of the water cycle and it helped me to get a general gist of what we were to present.  My partner and I learned that when water from all over the earth heats up, it evaporates then condenses when it hits the cool air it forms into clouds and the water vapor becomes heavy. When it becomes too heavy it precipitates and falls into run offs and supplies different lakes and rivers with water.  Also when water is absorbed by plants and released into water vapor by it's leaves it's called transpiration, another big part of the water cycle.  Then all of this goes on and on in a never ending cycle. Then we incorporated this into experiment in class. Mrs. Wood has my video but I can't find it. I'll try to post that if she gives it to us.

Monday 4/5

Water Issues

Our water issue topic was Global Warming.  Global warming is the the effect of warming of the earth when greenhouse gasses are trapped in the atmosphere. It also creates Drought is a prolonged period of abnormally low precipitation, which results to a low supply of water.  Edwards aquifer provides water for two million people in central/north Texas. However, demand for water has increased since the population keeps rising. Texas's hot weather then stresses the water supply, so we need more places to get water from.  Lake Travis and Lake Buchanan are also a main resource for water supply for farmers and our cities.  The issue facing this is that three years ago from October 2010 to May 2011 the water level fell to 1.4 million acre-feet, causing the Central/northern Texas region to begin stage 1 drought restrictions. This is just one effect of global warming (which some info was looked up online, not in presentation but you get my point).
Another effect is the melting of the icecaps. This is critical because polar bears could lose their habitat and the water levels could rise. When the water levels rise it could create flooding and too much water on our coasts.  The society needs to be aware because we could ultimately hurt our earth when we should be taking care of it by cutting back on driving, turning off electricity or cutting down on factories that we make that produce fossil fuels.