Pond Scum Revisited

We did it!! We cultured colonies of bacteria!! The book warned us that the smell would be pretty potent when we opened up the jars and they were right. Ewww. . .

Zach carefully opened the first jar and put two drops of the culture onto a slide. . .

He adjusted the microscope for the best view. . .

Believe it or not, I was actually pretty excited to see what the results would be. . . When it was finally my turn to look, this is what I saw:

This is from the jar with the soil. I'm still not sure what the different sources of nutrients had to do with the outcome of the experiment, but each slide looked a bit different from the others. I was actually able to take an interesting video. Well, interesting to me, anyway. . . The colony with the soil grew the largest bacteria:


The jar with the egg was, obviously, the smelliest:

The bacteria in this colony were tiny but active:

The third jar contained the dried grass:

There weren't quite as many in this colony so I'm assuming the dried grass had very little nutrients??????

I was surprised at how interesting these little guys were to look at. I kept trying to give them names like Hubert but Zach didn't think that was necessary.

Gloria loves getting in on Zach's science experiments.

Last, but not least, was the jar with the rice:

These little guys were similar to the egg-fed bacteria so I'm thinking all of this has something to do with how nutritious the environment is, but I don't really know. I guess I could read the book. . .

Or, I could just let Zach explain it all to me next week. . .


For not being a science-y person, I found this experiment to be fascinating. Zach was actually a little bored with it and was expecting something a little more exciting to happen. He went on to look at a variety of other things under the microscope like sprite and salt. . . I had no idea that salt looked like little squares and rectangles close up. . . I think this just might be the year that I start to enjoy science. Maybe.