This is one of the grossest things I think I've seen in quite a while. It is very interesting, but it seriously made my skin crawl. See. what happened was for a piano competition I got an honorable mention and so I got a bouquet of flowers. I put them in this green jar that I have in my window. They stayed fresh for quite awhile and when most of them were rotten a few really pretty purple ones dried instead of rotting. Of course then I did the logical lazy-man thing to do and threw away the rotten ones leaving the dried ones in the jar with the water. I don't know if any of you see any problem with my plan, but I was just going to throw out the water when I got around to it. (*Never a good plan.)
I completely forgot about them for awhile, maybe a month, then came back and this is what I found. Can you see in the bottom there? Those are the two stalks, but can you see how it's kind of milky around the stems? That is slime. The picture bellow is the stem pulled out of the water and the slime hanging from it. I don't know the scientific term for the slime, its probably some kind of algae colony, or something.
This, however, seemed very cool to me, so I decided that I would really like to see what actually made up this slime. So I pulled out my handy-dandy microscope and, using a scalpel, cut some of the slime off onto a slide. I have since disinfected everything in the surrounding area. Why? Watch my lovely video. It was taken through the eyepiece of my microscope. I had to put it on Facebook in order to not completely overwhelm my computer, so I'll put a link at the bottom. :) But if the videos don't work here are some pictures of one of my new-found "friends".
Isn't he lovely? :/ Yikes. I now have this entire jar of slime sitting out on the back porch; I thought I'd try to see how resilient these things are. Can you take the freeze? We'll see.
I have absolutely no idea what this is. I looked up microscopic insects on google, and all it came up with was dust mites, and these do look similar, but I can't quite see why I would have dust mites living in my slime. ??? I really don't know though. I'm going to ask the biology teacher at my school and see if he has any insight. I will update this if I find out what they are.
I do know, however, what paramecia are, and I found a ton of them living in my slime. They are so cute! I love single-celled organisms.
Here is the link: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=1449444478611105&set=vb.100006366993936&type=2&theater
The first video is my creepy insects, the second are my cute paramecia. Check them out and tell me if they don't work... Oh, sorry, its the other way around...
Thats... disgusting. But awesome microscope!
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