Big Stories From Tiny Life

I ended the last post with as much of a cliffhanger as I could muster.  I had students in my lab stain Wolffia to make their stomata (the tiny lines on the photograph; they are actually easier to see with a regular microscope) more visible for the purpose of counting and identifying the species.  The [...]

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Psychic

So I haven’t posted anything for months and today I finally wrote a piece about Wolffia, the smallest flowering plant, often confused with duckweed (Lemna).  I just got around to reading yesterday’s Boston Globe, and, lo and behold, there is an article about cleaning nutrients from a pond that fostered the growth of duckweed at [...]

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Shallow water chemistry

I’ve been writing about water, the stuff without which we would have no ponds.  Their meager depth hides the complexity of water in vernal pools.  I’ll provide one last bit of data from our studies in Oklahoma and then give my take on the relevance for everywhere else.
 My first post on this topic includes a [...]

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The Solution Revealed. 4.

Before leaving the topic of the predator Hydra I need to recount one last story.  The fourth part of my trilogy on my aquarium observations, if you will.  While I was doing the experiments dragging crushed zooplankton through the tentacles of Hydra, I tried many different species of potential prey.  All but one caused Hydra [...]

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