BIOLOGY:
Pond water lab
What are Protista?
Protozoa:
Animal like organisms who ingest their nutrients by engulfing their prey.
A true protozoan is composed of a nucleus and chromosomes along with other organelles and organelle systems that maintain any functions required (yes, I do have a large vocabulary) to withhold life, such as digestive organelles, and mitochondria.
Examples include:
- entamoeba, which induces diarrhea
- Trypanosomes, which induces "African sleeping sickness"
- Giardia lamblia, which induces an infection with in the small intestine
Diatom:
Descriptions:
Have hair like structures on them called cilia, they eat bacteria, and are able to live in fresh or salt water
Spirogyra:
Is a type of algae, they have a spiral of chloroplast beneath the cell surface. They produce food with photosynthesis.
Planarian:
A flatworm species that has three branches of digestive systems.
Nematodes:
Nematodes possess digestive, nervous, excretory, and reproductive systems, meaning they reproduce with fertilization
Rotifer:
The only hard part of the rotifer's body is the jaw, the rotifer are easy prey for other water organisms such as water shrimp.
Rotifer
^A generic food web of the pond^
The lab:
It was hard to to find Protista and snap a picture because not only did you have to focus on what looked lively and what didn't, but also having to dig through a slide with little or no life on it.
The most interesting organism found was the Vorticella, mainly because they were cropped together most of the time, it reminded me of tiny flowers with mouths... like Venus fly traps.
The planarian moved in a way that required it to move it's body back and forth, you could see through it and how it entrenched itself, it was repulsive and I hated it.
Nematodes have their niche in the pond, they feed off of other animals and organisms with in the ecosystem. They really just eat whatever they'd want.