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The Mysteries of Life in Pond Water

Published on Nov 22, 2015

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The Mysteries of Life in Pond Water

By Truett Pittman
Photo by Chalkie_CC

What are Protista?
Technically Protista are eukaryotic organisms that can't be classified as an animal, plant, or fungi. So they get thrown into one of the four groups of Protista

4 Groups of Protists

  • Single celled animal like protists
  • Single celled plant like protists
  • Multicellular plant like protists (specifically algae)
  • Fungus like protists

True protozoans specifically are single celled and heterotropic, have a membrane bound nucleus along with other organelles, and are microscopic. They also almost exclusively live in bodies of water or around them. They are also the evolutionary ancestors of more complex eukaryotic life such as plants, animals, and fungi. Which is why we classify protista as such

Photo by danrx1

This is a mircoscpoic look at algae cells

Algae are considered Plant-Like Protists, and they can be identified as such rom their green chlorophyll and no apparent system of roots, stems, or leaves


This is the microscopic look at an amphipod

This type of amphipod looks to be a freshwater shrimp with the way it looks, in that its curved and has the look of an invertebrate with an apparent exoskeleton, a segmented body, and jointed appendages

This is the microscopic look at a mosquito larva

This can be identified as a mosquito larva because of it's long body and other features that include the two antenna like things that stick out of its head

This is the microscopic look at a heliozoan

This protozoan appears to meet all the qualifications of a protist, with it being single celled with bound organelles, and it belongs to the Sacrodine group of animal like protista in that it moves with it's pseudopod. It can be identified as a heliozoan because of it's circular shape


Look at the organism in the upper left

This organism appears to be a worm like organism with it's body features resembling a leech of some sort or maybe even a spirotomum (a type of ciliate protist)

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The last picture shows a rotifer. Rotifers can be identified by their wheel like appendages, with a narrowing body to resemble a tail

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QUEstions??

1) What type of organism(s) was the most common in your samples?
Heliozoans were the most common organism in the pond water slides that i observed. They also hid around the clumped and densed algae

2) Why was it hard to find, take a picture of and identify actual Protista?
I think that it was hard because the little organism move around really quickly in the water and its hard to even get your camera to focus in the first place. Plus, i don't really have any experience identifying Protista so i had to go by what you said was true or what the key identified the organism as based on it's characteristics. There were a lot of organisms the key didn't have, so that made it difficult as well.

3) Discuss the most interesting organism you found and explain why you found it interesting?
The most interesting organism that i observed was the mosquito larvae because I was the first one to find it in the first place and i got to spend a lot of time observing the creature. It moved like a snake it a way, but extremely fast. Luckily for me, it stayed it one corner because it was obviously trying to escape. It was also interesting that you could see the inside of its body because it was transparent. The harder i looked, i thought there might have been some algae or something inside the larvae.

4) Discuss one of the organisms in terms of how it moved. What structure or method allowed it to move? The rotifer moved by flicking its tail like a fish would swim, and was constantly on the move. Another intreseting swimming method came from the heliozoan in that it had a really odd shaped body and used its pseudopod to move around. It reminded me of a vacuum cleaner, or silly putty of such. It would also swim very slowly, sometimes stay motionless then just suddenly race off to where i had to find it again.

5)Research one of the organisms you identified and discuss it's niche in a pond ecosystem?
So the mosquito larvae begins its life cycle in a source of stagnant water, and its interesting because the transformation of a larvae to an adult can take 4 days or up to a whole year. So the mosquito larvae is just kinda like a friend coming by to visit. Either they leave too soon or they out stay their welcome. Anyways, during this short period of time the larvae is constantly feeding to get bigger and eventually turn into a pupa. Their diet consists of algae (Like most organisms in the pond), other vegetation, smaller organisms such as protists, and sometimes each other. They may also be a snack for organisms like a frog, toad, tadpole, dragonfly nymph, slightly bigger fish such as Gambusia Affinis (mosquito fish), or smaller birds. Overall their role in the environment is the survive like all life on earth. However it provides a smaller snack tp go on up the food chain, and if they get to an adult sized mosquito their job is to give us Malaria(; (at least the females do)