Mason: The Worm Plan

For those who don’t know me yet I am Mason Sylvester and I am doing a project on earthworms and how chemical fertilizers impact them. I am measure this by how many die in a fish tank over a three week period. Time might change but is going to be around the time frame. The types of worms that I am going to be using are night crawlers which are the most common type of earthworm we have around here or that everyone is familiar with.The picture to the right is a night crawler. Their vertical burrowing earthworms which is perfect for my project. The way I am going to be doing this is I will have 4 fish tanks that are five gallons each and then I will put soil from my backyard that is not been fertilized and then put ten worms in. From their I will spray water four times a week, that number might change but should be around four. I will then put fertilizer into three of the tanks and using the instructions on the fertilizer so I don’t have anything that is different from any of the tanks except the amount that is being applied. The type of fertilizer I used will be in the link I provide (fertilizer) . The fourth tank will not have any fertilizer. They will be place in a dark area with no sunlight so they don’t fry.  After three weeks I will count the number of dead worms for each tank and record the data into a graph for comparison.  I will also put organic matter into each fish tank for food so that they don’t die of starvation instead of the fertilizer.

Angela, CUR - Freshwater Jellyfish?

I'm still looking for my ideal long-term garbage research location up here in Oregon. This weekend I visited Dorena Lake, which unexpectedly turned out to be a trash mecca, but is located 50 minutes too far from my house for weekly research on my currently limited gas budget.

Dorena Lake

In addition to the usual suspects: plastic bottles, Styrofoam cups, wrappers, and cans, I came across a myriad collection of broken glass. In my two and a half years of collecting trash I have never seen so much glass; however, something else I found had me more confused.

Bryozoan Colony?

Bryozoan Colony with Statoblasts?

It seems the dam holding back the water in Dorena Lake had recently been opened to release some of it because the shore was incredibly muddy and littered with dozens of jellyfish-like blobs. After some googling, I believe these blobs are Bryozoans, which according to the Missouri Department of Conservation are "microscopic aquatic invertebrates that live in colonies." Fascinatingly, as gross as they look, these filter feeders actually help keep the water clean. I was wondering if the little black spots in the last image are fish eggs, but - according to the Encyclopedia of Life - the individual organisms in the colony reproduce via "seedlike statoblasts", thus I am assuming the black specs are offspring.