The Ecosphere Wonderland [by JESK]

Authors: Emma Brasseur, Shane Hall, Jessica Roth, & Karina Yu

Recap:

Snail	Heterotroph	1 Snail
Shrimp	Heterotroph	1 Shrimp
Bacopa Plant	Autotrophic	1 Bacopa Plant
Aquatic Floating Fern	Autotrophic	1 Aquatic Floating Fern
Anabaena	Autotrophic	2.25 mL
Daphnia	Heterotrophic	4.75 mL

Table 1: The original contents of our ecosphere

New Developments:

Since our last post, our ecosphere has developed more algae, and snail babies (Figure 4). The development of our snail babies was slightly surprising to us, considering our parent snail has been dead/decomposed for quite some time now (Figure 3). Other than these new forms of life, our ecosphere is the same. Our shrimp is still alive and is doing very well. We were even able to record our shrimp hightailing around the ecosphere.

Compare:

We compared our ecosphere to Mariam’s group ecosphere (Figure 5). They included a snail, and the aquatic floating fern in their ecosphere like our group, but they did not add a shrimp, daphnia, anabaena, or bacopa like we did. However, MCDC had hay and three mermaid plants in their ecosphere. In the similar organisms the main difference was that their snail was still alive. Also, the water in their ecosphere seems to be a bit clearer, while ours is a little murky.

Video 1: Video of Shrimp

Figure 1: Ecosphere on May 11

Figure 2: Shrimp Swimming Around Ecosphere [May 11]

Figure 3: Decomposing Snail [May 18]

Figure 4: Baby Snails on Side of Container, As Well As Algal Growth [ May 18]

Figure 5: Mariam’s Group Ecosphere