Pond Water

In class last Thursday we got to look at pond water through a microscope. I thought it was super cool! There were so many little creatures and things to see in just one tiny drop. It kind of grosses me out that there is that much stuff in the water when I am swimming though. There were a lot of moving organisms but also a lot of algae and rocks. I saw a lot of filamentous green algae. That was easy to identify and looked really cool close up. The flatworm that I saw was really cool when it moved around because it was flat and then all of a sudden it was a weird long shape and then it would get flat again. The round worm was the grossest thing. It just slithered around and kept appearing. We kept trying to chase it around the slide. I also found this creature that looked like a little see-through crab. I looked it up and found out that it was most likely a water flea. The last organism that I identified was a green algae with flagella. It moved fast and looked kind of gross too.

Water fleas can live in a variety of places such as acidic swamps or freshwater lakes, ponds, rivers and streams. Their eggs are enclosed in a shell that protects them. Their life spans range from 5-6 months to 13-15 months. Water fleas eat mostly algae, protists and bacteria.

This is a picture of what my groups pond water looked like through the microscope.