Fifth Observation

WE HAVE SPROUTS! There are four small 1 inch sprouts. There is condensation on the top and the bottom. The soil looks much more moist from last week. The water level is at 15 cm. The elodia plant has rooted itself back into the gravel, and has grow 2 centimeters. The branch that grew a few weeks ago is much longer, and there is another sprout on the other side of the plant. There are many more daphnia swimming around. We cannot see our snails, but we hypothesize that they have dug into the rocks due to the cold weather. There is one small baby snail attached to the side of the bottle. The string in the water is blackened in a few spots, and there a white mold like substance at the top of the string.

 OUR SPROUTS!!!!!

 Our new branch of Elodea

Our daphnia

Our baby snail 

Fourth Observation

October 22, 2015

It’s four weeks in and unfortunately, our plants are still not growing and our soil was dry, but on the bright side our elodea plant continued to grow. Since our soil was very dry, so we were instructed to add more water to our ecosystem. At first we barely opened the top bottle and added water by using a pipepet. We did not get very far with that, so we opened up the top half of the bottle and poured water into our soil. Hopefully, next week we can see some plant growth.

Our snails were still alive and we saw one daphea swimming around. We also saw that there was black stuff on our string and white foam forming around the top of the string near the top.

Third Observation

10/8

It has now been two weeks since we first created our terrarium! There is condensation forming along the sides of the top of both bottles. The soil seems to be damp along the sides where the condensation is forming, but the rest looks pretty dry. We can see the daphnia moving around, and one of them seems to have grown! The string has begun floating above the surface, and there is some type of fuzz growing along the side of the string. The elodea is no longer rooted in the rocks, and is now flowing in the water. We are not quite sure at this point as to whether or not our snails are still alive… They don’t seem to be moving even when we try and move them around.

Second Observation

We were very excited for our second observation. We rushed outside to see how big our sprouts were, but to our dismay there were none. We looked all around, but there were no sprouts. There was some condensation formed along the side of the bottle where the string was located. The soil was only damp on this edge, and it was quite dry everywhere else. We are very interested to see whether or not sprouts form in the upcoming week. Down in the bottle side of our ecosystem there was more activity. The deaphia looked larger than last week are were moving around. There seemed to be more deaphia than last week. We noticed that the majority of the string was still floating above the surface, but the part that was submerged had some type of fuzz growing along it. Our elodea plant was no longer planted in the gravel, but it was floating. Again to our great dismay our snails seemed to have died! None of them were moving and one looked black. Overall, the second observation was a bit disappointing. We were looking forward to seeing our plants grow. We look forward to seeing what happens with our ecosystem in a bottle in the upcoming week.

First Observation

First Observation 10/1/15

Today was our first day building our terrarium. In our terrarium we added one elodea plant that had a length of 13 cm, 3 snails, 6 daphia, and 6 seeds. The seeds we added were 5-summer sunshine and 1 radish. We planted the radish seed in the middle and the summer sunshine flowers around the radish. When we added our snails to the bottom bottle and they began to move in the water, and the elodea was healthy. Through out the semester we hope to see our plants grow, and for our snails to stay alive.