ECOSPHERE BLOG POST BY GROUP REJ
Members: Jaena Bautista, Nhung Nguyen, Robert Barker
Intro
We started this adventure of making our ecosphere a little over a month ago, there has been little change. The only main changes are; the water has dissipated as hoped for and our daphnia has grown to great abundance.
As we continue to observe our ecosphere, organisms carry on to survive. Here are some observations that show evidence of the ecosphere having enough nutrients to thrive, grow healthy and reproduce:
- Our snail got much bigger and healthier (as you can see from the Figure 2)
- Daphias reproduced a lot! It is most likely to fill the entire jar. But because of the very tiny size, we were not able to take a picture of it.
- Clean pond water
- Unknown organisms reproduce. One of our unidentified organisms is an aquatic worm which we talked about on our last Ecosphere blog.
- Our Bacopa Caroliniana grew in a healthy condition
Figure 2: Snail in our Ecosphere Figure 3: Bacopa Caroliniana
But on the last day of our observation, we identified a part of the Bacopa being decomposed and turning yellow. Here is a picture of it (Figure 4).
Figure 4: Unhealthy leaves of Bacopa
The only unhealthy (almost dead) organism in our ecosphere is the autotroph which is the Ceratopteris. As you can see from Figure 5 and 6, after one week, the plant has almost lost all of its leaves. The stems of our Ceratopteris also turned brown and looked very weak. Until now, we could not identify the reason why the plant became sick.
Figure 5 and 6: Our Ceratopteris with unhealthy stems and no leaf. 
Comparison
From others that have done a very similar ecosphere, we have had the cleanest water. The group 4.0 [A] had a lot less soil and gravel, however; their water was more polluted. We think the reason for that is because they had added green algae.
Also, another group that caught our attention was the Dream Team. Our group were impressed by how lively and thriving their ecosphere was, especially their unusually huge Daphnia army was very fun to look at! Comparing to these giants, our Daphnia are just as tiny as dust particles, very hard to see with naked eyes, not to say they got smaller than the time we first introduced them to our ecosphere. We see this size difference as an interesting example of how nutrition affects the growth of organisms. As we looked through the Dream Team’s set-up, we found the key seemed to lie in their pond water/tap water plus nutrients combination and the wide variety of protists and bacteria they added into their ecosphere, which we believe would make up a highly abundant food source for the Daphnia to grow big and healthy.
References
Very nicely put together post! It is nice to see that you guys ecosphere sustained very well throughout the experiment. The yellowness in the Bacopa plant may have been the cause of nitrogen deficiency in the soil that you guys used. In addition, the other plant dropping leaves and being sick may have been the cause of other ion deficiencies which are important for the growth of plants.
ReplyDeleteFrom looking at the picture, I can see that you group's ecosphere water is very clean and clear. Good job on making an ecosphere that helps the Daphnia to reproduce a lot of offsprings. Not only your Daphnia reproduce, but I see a lot of baby snails on the side of the mason jar.
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