User talk:Alexa Coon
Hello, Alexa Coon! This is a welcome message from OpenWetWare. By the way, we've announced you on the home page! You can leave messages to any OWW member by editing their User_talk pages like this one. And don't forget to personalize your User Page so that we can get to know you better! We've included some tips below to get you started.
Bio 2013 1. Hay Infusion Lab
Sophomore
Biological Life at Au
This is my attempt to figure this site out...hope it worked.
Lab 1 Biological Life at AU
Purpose
This experiment involved observing a tract of land at American University, a niche, as a jumping point for discussing ecosystems. Each group was expected to take down various biotic, or living, and abiotic, or nonliving, things they found in their swatch of land. This helped to assess the biodiversity present across the campus and which populations were found in which locations.
Materials and Methods
The group in which I worked was assigned a transect near the gym. At the site of the transect we found each of the Popsicle sticks that marked the edges and drew from an overhead perspective what we saw. Each item we observed was labeled. After this we took note of what biotic and abiotic material was present in the space we had mapped. Using a 5mL conical tube we collected 10 to 12 grams of soil as a sample of our transect. This we took back to the lab and added to 500 mLs of deerpark water in a plastic jar as well as 0.1 grams of dried milk. This was all mixed so that the organisms present in the sample could grow so that they could be observed at a later date. The prepared jar was left uncovered at the end of class.
Data and Observations
The area that was assigned to my group was part of a man-made garden which had elements of human impact. So some of abiotic features we found there include a bench, a lightpost, paper, and a sidewalk, as well as more natural things like hay, snow, and dirt. The biotic features included shrubs, trees, leaves, vines, and bushes.
Conclusions and Future Directions
The Hay Infusion that was created at the end of the lab period will wait until the following week to be tested for organisms, but since there are already a good number of living things present in the transect, like trees and bushes, it is safe to say that there will be many more living organisms to discover under a microscopic lens. In the future if this experiment were to be repeated, it would be interesting to have multiple infusions with various amount of milk in them. This would be likely to change how much growth there is in the infusion and is likely to result in much higher rates of bacterial presence.
Lab 2 Identifying Algae and Protist 22 January 2015
Purpose This lab was focused on identifying various unicellular eukarya so that we could use our knowledge of the eukarya to determine what organisms were present in the Hay Infusion we created during the last experiment. Given that there were many biotic features present in our Hay Infusion, we hypothesized that there would be a lot of unicellular eukarya growing in our jar.
Materials and Methods • Wet mount of known organisms o Focus on the organism and describe it, measure it (at 40x the objective spaces are 2.5 micrometers) • Use dichotomous key to identify the organism observed • Repeat with samples of Hay Infusion o Two samples from different parts of the jar: 1. Settled film at the top, 2. Bottom near the sediment • Keep track of the organisms in notebook, measuring size and using the dichotomous key for identification • Prep for next lab: labeled four 10 mL tubes of sterile broth with 10^-2, 10^-4, 10^-6 and 10^-8 • Four nutrient agar plates and four nutrient agar plates with tet, labeled each 10^-3, 10^-5, 10^-7, 10^-9 • 100 microliters of the Hay Infusion is added to the broth with the 10^-2 label, 100 microliters of that is added to the 10^-4, repeat for 10^-6 and 10^-8 • Plated by adding 100 microliters of the sample 10^-2 to the 10^-3 agar plate • Left to incubate for 1 week
Data and Observations The Hay Infusion culture that our group looked at had turned greenish brown and the leaves and large debris had settled to the bottom. It smelled like rotting and trash. When we took the first sample it was off the top where the film had settled. Here we found chlamydomonas around 8 to 10 micrometers long, colpidium that seemed to be around 50 micrometers, and paramecium bursaria that were near 70 micrometers long. The sample we took from the bottom yielded an unidentifiable paramecium that we though could be either eudorina or pandoma paramecium, a couple peranema around 30 micrometers, and a chlamydomonas. A final sample that we looked at since we had time came from the middle where a lot of the leaves had settled. In this sample we found more paramecium bursaria around 80 micrometers. File:Forbio
Conclusions and Future Directions Our hypothesis that there would be a number of microorganism in our Hay Infusion was correct, we were able to find a lot of eukarya living in the samples that we pulled and investigated. If we had done a more thorough survey of the infusion, we would have probably found more types living in the samples. Varying other factors like time, leaving the infusion for 2 or 3 weeks, or adding more milk could have produced more eukarya to observe in culture.
